M John Harrison Becomes Oldest Booker Prize Winner at 81 With 'The End of Everything'

On Monday evening in London, M John Harrison, 81, was named winner of the Booker Prize for The End of Everything, a post-apocalyptic novel, and in doing so became the oldest person ever to take the award. The prize is worth £50,000. He passes Margaret Atwood, who had held the age record until now.

Harrison started writing in the 1960s and has built a cult following across a career of some 60 years. His output includes 13 novels, five short story collections and what he calls an "anti-memoir". He has little patience for labels like science fiction and fantasy, though others have applied them freely; one description called him "the titan of literary science fiction". Gaby Wood, the Booker Prize's chief executive, said he is the first Booker winner to have come from the genuine SF world, and called him a original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously.

The novel is set in the years after a mysterious catastrophe that has caused British society as we know it to collapse. It follows a man and his aunt as they muddle through on the south-east English coast, after an unexplained disaster and the arrival of strange alien beings. Wood offered a pointed reading of it: though very unsettling, she said, it is not in fact a strange book, but a realist book about a strange world, populated by desperate, unmoored characters.

Harrison has said he left out as much background explanation as he could, so that readers would share the characters' disorientation. In his words, the book is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong, and it is a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend. He added that he has passed on to the reader some of the puzzlement and confusion the characters feel as they face a future with the alien.

That approach has split opinion. The Guardian praised the book but warned it will not be for everyone. The New York Times observed that the more we learn about the conditions of the broken world, the harder it is to grasp. The Literary Review called it a work of uncanny beauty, tender and terrifying in equal parts, while the Telegraph said you feel you are not so much reading as dreaming. Another Telegraph critic judged it, in both skill and humour, a cut above the other shortlisted books, and added that in an age of threatening AI overlords and government advice to stockpile tinned food and bottled water, it is for once a novel that can genuinely be called timely. One critic summed it up as "bleak but brilliant" and another as "dreamlike and baffling".

Dame Mary Beard, who chaired the judges, did not dodge the difficulty. It is a challenging read, she said, but some of the best fiction is challenging. She described a book that turns you upside down, raises a wry smile, and, surprisingly given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism.

Harrison beat five other shortlisted books: The Disappearers by Marlon James, Black Bag by Luke Kennard, May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, and John of John by Douglas Stuart. The Booker, launched in 1969, goes to the best novel written in English and published in the year up to 30 September.

The judging was not easy. When the shortlist emerged in September, Beard said settling on the six had been, to put it mildly, hard work. Patricia Lockwood, the US novelist on the panel, said she had been tossing books across the room, and poet Raymond Antrobus called it a tussle. Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and the critic and editor Rebecca Liu completed the panel. Beard said the final session brought a lot of discussion, disagreement and debate, but nobody stomped off. The judges spent a whole day on the six books before reaching a unanimous decision.

What to watch now is whether the win draws new readers to a book its own champions admit is demanding, and whether it shifts how literary prizes treat writers from the SF world.