Britain's M. John Harrison won the 2026 Booker Prize for "The End of Everything", announced on Monday night, 9 November, at a ceremony in London. At 81, he is the oldest winner in the history of the prize, created in 1969 and today the most influential award in English-language fiction.
The prize is worth £50,000, with £2,500 for each of the other five shortlisted authors.
A 198-page novel
"The End of Everything" is a 198-page dystopian satire, the shortest book on the shortlist. It follows a beachcomber and his aunt, who carries a pistol, on the Kent coast after the collapse of society. It was published by Serpent's Tail, which had never published a Booker winner.
The panel was chaired by the historian Mary Beard and made up of the poet Raymond Antrobus, the musician Jarvis Cocker, the journalist Rebecca Liu and the writer Patricia Lockwood. The five debated the six finalists for a full day before reaching a unanimous decision. Beard praised the book's "extraordinary, expert writing and huge ambition" and described the novel as the politics of the present seen "through the lens of the future". The judges said that, despite its setting, the book "leaves you with a twinge of optimism".
Harrison said he now feels "like a proper writer at last".
Sixty years on the margins
The winner built his body of work far from the big literary prize circuit. A pioneer of the British science fiction New Wave, author of novels such as "Light" and of the Viriconium sequence, he was also a rock climber and fell runner — and had already won the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain literature for "Climbers" in 1989, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for "Nova Swing" in 2007 and the Goldsmiths Prize for "The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again" in 2020. In 2022, he served as a Booker judge himself.
The choice also says something about the prize: after years of rewarding long novels and recent debutants, the 2026 panel went for the shortest book on the list, by an 81-year-old author who came out of genre fiction.
The shortlist
Alongside Harrison, the finalists were:
- Marlon James, "The Disappearers" — winner in 2015
- Douglas Stuart, "John of John" — winner in 2020
- Elizabeth Strout, "The Things We Never Say"
- Luke Kennard, "Black Bag"
- Rebecca Perry, "May We Feed the King"
In 2025 the prize went to "Flesh", by the British-Hungarian writer David Szalay.
With information from The Irish Times, Business Standard and the Booker Prizes website.
