M. John Harrison Wins 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything

M. John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything, with the Booker Prize Foundation framing the result as a milestone for a writer long identified with science fiction. In announcing the award, the foundation said Harrison is the first Booker winner to have emerged from the “bona fide SF world,” a notable distinction for one of the English-speaking world’s most prominent fiction prizes.

The winner was announced Monday, Nov. 9, at the Booker Prize ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The award carries £50,000, or about $64,000, and a trophy. Harrison, 81, is now the oldest winner in Booker Prize history, surpassing Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she won in 2019.

Mary Beard, the classicist and chair of this year’s judging panel, said: “The Booker judges spent a whole day debating the six remarkable novels on this year’s shortlist, before agreeing unanimously to award the 2026 prize to The End of Everything by M. John Harrison. … 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.”

The End of Everything, published by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books, is a dystopian, satirical novel set on the Kent coast in the near future, amid social collapse and the arrival of enigmatic shape-changing entities known as the “iGhetti.”

The Booker Prize Foundation cast Harrison’s win as distinct from earlier Booker victories by novelists who have used speculative or dystopian elements in their work. “Many past Booker Prize authors have borrowed facets of science fiction in their work, but M. John Harrison is the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world. He is a genuinely original thinker, a genre‑defying writer who takes ideas seriously,” Gaby Wood, the foundation’s chief executive, said.

Harrison is a British author whose career has spanned about 60 years and crossed literary, science-fiction and fantasy boundaries. This was his first Booker nomination and his first Booker win. His previous major honors include the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Nova Swing in 2007 and the Goldsmiths Prize for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again in 2020. Harrison said of the new novel: “Current affairs provided the themes and the satire: what happens when all of our expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but we still have to make a life?”

The 2026 judging panel also included poet Raymond Antrobus, musician Jarvis Cocker, critic Rebecca Liu and novelist Patricia Lockwood. The judges considered 163 eligible books published in the U.K. or Ireland between Oct. 1, 2025, and Sept. 30, 2026. Other shortlisted authors were Marlon James for The Disappearers, Luke Kennard for Black Bag, Rebecca Perry for May We Feed the King, Elizabeth Strout for The Things We Never Say and Douglas Stuart for John of John. Harrison’s victory also marked the first Booker Prize win for Serpent’s Tail.