M. John Harrison Becomes First SF Writer to Win Booker Award

The 81-year-old’s postapocalyptic novel The End of Everything takes home the £50,000 award

Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history. Harrison is the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world of published literature.

Harrison, who has been publishing for six decades, overtakes Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the prize in 2019 for The Testaments. He received the £50,000 award and trophy at a ceremony in London on Monday evening.

The End of Everything, Harrison’s first Booker nomination, is set a few decades from now, years after a disaster nobody can properly account for. Set on the Kent coast, the novel sees Phillip Tennent and his aging aunt Marnie attempting to survive alongside the looming threat of the mysterious iGhetti: vast, shape-changing beings whose origins, presence and intent are never explained. At 198 pages, it was the shortest book on the shortlist.

Mary Beard, chair of the judges, said the decision was unanimous, reached after a full day of discussion. “It’s a book that turns you upside down, raises a wry smile – and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism,” she said. “One main point of the book is that if, or when, such an apocalypse comes it will be incomprehensible. And the old rules won’t matter either … This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.”

Harrison, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945, sold his first story in 1965 and spent most of the 1970s running the books pages of the speculative fiction magazine New Worlds. He has also authored five anthologies and the “anti-memoir” Wish I Was Here (2023). Climbers took the Boardman Tasker prize for mountain literature in 1989, Nova Swing the Arthur C Clarke award in 2007, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again took the Goldsmiths prize in 2020. Once a keen climber and fell runner, Harrison himself sat on the Booker judging panel in 2022.

Harrison has described The End of Everything as “a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend”, with aliens who arrive “as incomers from another dimension, paralleling the gentrification of places like the UK’s south-east coast”. He admitted to passing on to the reader “some of the puzzlement and confusion of the characters”, but said he hoped the issues were transparent – among them “the collapse of rationality that comes with Trumpism and the internet”.

Also on the judging panel were Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, authors Patricia Lockwood and Raymond Antrobus and Guardian journalist Rebecca Liu. The competition included 163 books published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.

It is the first Booker win for Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of the independent publisher Profile Books, and its fifth nomination.