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

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.

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while plenty of previous winners had dabbled in science fiction, Harrison's was "the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world". She called it "a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page".

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 ageing aunt Marnie attempting to 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 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. Alongside his novels he has written five short-story collections 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 the Goldsmiths prize in 2020. Once a keen climber and fell runner, he sat on the Booker judging panel in 2022.

This year's shortlist included two former winners: Marlon James, the bookmakers' favourite, for The Disappearers, and 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 completed the list. Each shortlisted author receives £2,500.

Writing in the Guardian on his inspiration last week, Harrison 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".

His win marks a rare moment of mainstream recognition for a writer long revered by his peers but at the margins of literary fiction. On BBC Radio 4's Front Row last month, Harrison said he had been "working for 40 to 50 years to shift the balance, both as a novelist and as a critic", adding: "Why shouldn't a well written [work of] SF be considered to be literary fiction?"

Even admirers concede the book is not an easy read. In a rave review for the Guardian, Michel Faber said it "exposes the terrifying insecurity of life right now", but warned that "it won't be for everyone".

The win is timely in the age of AI. Beard noted that the "i" in iGhetti hints "at something digital, but you can't be sure", while Wood described the book's post-apocalyptic landscape as "Large Language Model-dotted".

The judging panel also included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, authors Patricia Lockwood and Raymond Antrobus and Guardian journalist Rebecca Liu. They considered 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. Hungarian-British author David Szalay won last year with Flesh; other recent winners include Samantha Harvey's Orbital, Paul Lynch's Prophet Song and Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.