M John Harrison becomes first science fiction author to win the Booker prize

M. John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize for his post-apocalyptic novel The End of Everything, becoming the first science fiction author to win the award and its oldest winner at age 81, according to NPR and The Guardian. Harrison, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945, has been publishing for six decades and sold his first story in 1965. The Guardian reported that he spent most of the 1970s running the books pages of the speculative fiction magazine New Worlds.

The novel follows Philip Tennent and his ageing aunt Marnie on the Kent coast in a near-future world years after a disaster nobody can properly account for. They survive alongside the looming threat of the mysterious iGhetti, vast shape-changing beings whose origins and intentions are never explained. At 198 pages, it was the shortest book on the shortlist.

Mary Beard, chair of this year's judges, said the decision was unanimous after a full day of discussion. She called it "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 added that if or when such an apocalypse comes it will be incomprehensible and the old rules won't matter either, describing it as "the politics of now seen through the lens of the future."

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said Harrison is "the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world" and called it "a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page." NPR noted that many past Booker authors have borrowed facets of science fiction, but Harrison emerged from the genre itself.

Harrison received the £50,000 award and trophy at a ceremony in London on Monday evening. The trophy is presented by the previous year's winner, David Szalay, who won the 2025 prize with his novel Flesh. Each shortlisted author receives £2,500.

This year's shortlist included Marlon James for The Disappearers, Douglas Stuart for John of John, Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, Luke Kennard's Black Bag and Rebecca Perry's debut May We Feed the King. The judges considered 163 books published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026. The panel also included poet Raymond Antrobus, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, editor and critic Rebecca Liu, and poet and novelist Patricia Lockwood.

The win is the first Booker win for Serpent's Tail, an imprint of the independent publisher Profile Books, and its fifth nomination. Harrison's previous accolades include Nova Swing, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick awards, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which won the Goldsmiths prize in 2020.