M. John Harrison Wins 2026 Booker Prize with Science Fiction Novel 'The End of Everything'

On Monday in London, the British writer M. John Harrison, 81, was named winner of the Booker Prize for fiction for "The End of Everything," a satirical dystopian novel. The prize carries 50,000 pounds, about $67,000. It is the first time a work of science fiction has taken the award.

The book is set on England's Channel coast in the near future. An unspecified calamity has broken society apart and brought a wave of enigmatic alien entities to Britain. At its center is a beachcomber who lives with his gun-toting aunt and finds a puzzling, shape-shifting artifact on the shore. Critics have praised its dark humor, though some have found its elusive narrative confusing.

Harrison beat five other finalists. Among them were two previous winners, Douglas Stuart and Marlon James, who had been the oddsmakers' favorites, and Pulitzer Prize laureate Elizabeth Strout. Historian Mary Beard, who chaired the judging panel, described the novel as "the politics of now seen through the lens of the future," about a society going through a catastrophe it does not really understand. In her telling, the book's point is that when catastrophe arrives, you won't know what is happening, and some passages leave the reader in the same confusion as the characters. She called that "fantastically exciting."

The judges, who also included the poet Raymond Antrobus and Jarvis Cocker, the singer from the band Pulp, met for four or five hours before choosing. Beard said the decision was unanimous. Harrison is the oldest writer ever to win the Booker, two years older than Margaret Atwood was when she won in 2019, and this is his 13th novel. Beard insisted the award was not a lifetime achievement prize: the judges, she said, felt this was a book that had earned it.

Harrison has spent six decades as an author. He worked for years at the speculative fiction magazine New Worlds and won the Arthur C. Clarke science fiction award for an earlier novel, "Nova Swing." Before the result, he said he had spent 40 to 50 years trying to shift the balance as both novelist and critic, asking why a well-written work of science fiction shouldn't be considered literary fiction. Borders between publishing genres have been blurring, but it remains rare for science fiction to win a major literary prize.

At the post-ceremony news conference, he said he does not want to be confined by the sci-fi label, and that the win shows the era of genres as fences and boxes is over. A book can mix not just two genres but three or four, he said. He also criticized the publishing industry for doing nothing to break down category barriers: books are framed as something else in order to sell them, which he called quite offensive to the author. The Booker, he said, gives you permission to be what you are, without a label stuck on your forehead.

Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood noted that the prize has dropped references to "literary fiction" from its materials, because all fiction is literary. Beard called the win recognition of what some would see as blindingly obvious: great books exist in every genre.

Founded in 1969, the Booker is open to English-language novels from any country published in the U.K. and Ireland, and is known for transforming writers' careers. Past winners include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Arundhati Roy; last year's was David Szalay's "Flesh." Asked about the money, Harrison said he would probably spend it on house repairs, since being an author means your house is always falling down. The question now is whether publishers change how they market speculative fiction.