M. John Harrison, 81, wins the Booker Prize for sci-fi novel The End of Everything

The British writer M. John Harrison won the 2026 Booker Prize on 9 November for The End of Everything, a darkly comic novel about a Britain broken by an unexplained disaster. It is the first work of science fiction to win the prize.

Mr. Harrison, 81, received the £50,000 award at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. He is the oldest winner in the prize’s history, two years older than Margaret Atwood was when she won in 2019, AP reported.

The book

The novel is set on England’s south coast in the near future. Society has collapsed after a disaster that is never explained, and strange alien beings have arrived. Its hero is a beachcomber who lives with his aunt and finds a mysterious object that keeps changing shape.

The historian Mary Beard, who chaired the judges, called it the politics of the present seen through the future. She said the book shows a society facing a catastrophe it does not understand. The other judges included the poet Raymond Antrobus and the singer Jarvis Cocker.

Why it matters

Science fiction is rarely honoured by major literary prizes. Mr. Harrison said before the award that he had spent 40 to 50 years arguing that well-written science fiction belongs with literary fiction. The Booker Prize Foundation’s chief executive, Gaby Wood, said the prize had stopped using the term “literary fiction” because all fiction is literary.

Mr. Harrison beat five other finalists, including two past winners, Douglas Stuart and Marlon James, and the American Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout. The End of Everything is his 13th novel. He earlier won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction for Nova Swing.

The background

The Booker, founded in 1969, is open to novels in English from any country that are published in the UK and Ireland. Its winners include Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. Last year’s prize went to Flesh by David Szalay.