• Genre-defying British author M. John Harrison wins the Booker Prize; at 81, he becomes the oldest author to win in the history of the prize, with a writing career spanning 60 years 
• Chair of the judges Mary Beard describes The End of Everything as ‘the politics of now seen through the lens of the future’, adding: ‘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.’ 
• The End of Everything is Harrison’s 13^th novel; a dystopian satire that probes the limits of human understanding 
• Harrison said of writing The End of Everything: ‘Current affairs provided the themes and the satire: what happens when all of our expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but we still have to make a life?’ 
• At 198 pages, The End of Everything was the shortest book on the shortlist  
• First Booker Prize win for independent publisher Serpent’s Tail 
• An extract from The End of Everything, performed by the acclaimed actor Kathryn Hunter for the Booker Prize 2026 shortlist films, was screened at the ceremony 

 Further reading: Everything you need to know about The End of Everything by M. John Harrison

The End of Everything by British author M. John Harrison is tonight, Monday, 9 November, named the winner of the Booker Prize 2026. Harrison receives £50,000 and a trophy, presented to him by last year’s winner David Szalay, at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London. The event was broadcast live in a special episode of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, hosted by Samira Ahmed. It was also livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ YouTube and Instagram channels, with additional red-carpet coverage posted on the Booker Prizes’ social accounts. Watch the livestream here. 

The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction. The prize is open to authors from anywhere in the world, writing in English, and published in the UK and/or Ireland. It has rewarded and celebrated world-class talent for over 55 years, helping shape the canon of 20th and 21^st-century English language literature. Previous winners of the prize include Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Paul Beatty, Bernardine Evaristo and Samantha Harvey. 

The End of Everything was selected as the winner from a shortlist of six books by the 2026 judging panel, who all attended the ceremony. The panel was chaired by celebrated classicist, writer and broadcaster Mary Beard, who was joined by award-winning poet, writer and educator Raymond Antrobus; musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker; journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu; and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood. They considered 163 books and were looking for the best work of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026. 

The End of Everything is a destabilising and satirical dystopian novel that follows a beachcomber and his pistol-toting aunt as they eke out an existence together on a near-future Kent coast. The narrative is set against a backdrop of societal collapse and the mysterious invasion of shapeshifting entities called the iGhetti. A violent act near the start of the novel plunges the characters into a post-moral universe. Like the fog that intermittently cloaks the vividly rendered landscapes within it, the novel is shrouded in a dream-like ambiguity. Writing in short, filmic chapters, Harrison both leans on conventional literary forms and upends them, probing the limits of human understanding and letting the reader fill in the gaps.  At 198 pages, it was the shortest book on the shortlist.  

‘The Booker judges spent a whole day debating the six remarkable novels on this year’s shortlist, before agreeing unanimously to award the 2026 prize to The End of Everything by M. John Harrison. 

‘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. Central to the story are Phillip Tennent and his elderly aunt Marnie, living on the south coast of England, a few decades into the future, some years after a mysterious catastrophe: an invasion of “iGhetti” (the “i” hinting at something digital, but you can’t be sure).  

‘Social norms have been eroded, law and order have fallen into the hands of vigilantes, and you may well have a crashed plane lodged in your garden. People try to muddle through nonetheless, even making a show of business as usual (children’s parties and a morning coffee at a seaside café). 

‘Some try desperately to make sense of what has happened. But 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. Phillip is landed with an “item” he found on the beach, a blob of jelly which quickly grows, develops speech and starts to tell his human minders what to do. This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.’ 

‘Many past Booker Prize authors have borrowed facets of science fiction in their work, but M. John Harrison is the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world. He is a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously. 

‘The End of Everything is a novel that knows everything about the novel form, and exactly what it’s doing when it breaks it. Readers will also recognise many tropes from cinema: the disaster movie, the road movie, the couple on the run, the noir heroine with a gun in her bag, the apocalypse.  

‘Though very unsettling, The End of Everything is not in fact a strange book. It’s a realist book about a strange world, populated by desperate, unmoored characters. One of the judges memorably described it as owing as much to Katherine Mansfield as it does to J.G. Ballard. Marnie, one of the protagonists, suffers from dementia, and dementia offers a framework for understanding the novel as a whole: everything in this post-disaster world is scrambled.  

‘Harrison reports on an imagined post-apocalyptic, Large Language Model-dotted landscape with a documentary eye. Like his beachcomber character Philip, Harrison is a collector: he has spent a lifetime gathering words for things most people would not think to name. His sentences are collages of intense descriptive precision.  

‘This is a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page.’ 

Harrison wins with his first nomination for the Booker Prize. He has spent 60 years cultivating a genre-defying writing career during which time he has worked as a literary critic and published 13 novels, five short story collections and an ‘anti-memoir’. At 81, he is the oldest winner in the history of the prize (a title previously held by Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she jointly won in 2019 with The Testaments). The End of Everything went to number eight in the Times bestseller list when it was published in June and Helen Macdonald wrote in the Observer ‘I don’t think I’ll read a better book this year, perhaps decade’. It is also included on the retailer Blackwell’s Book of the Year 2026 shortlist.  

Harrison’s award-winning novels include Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989; Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2007; and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which won the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize for innovation in fiction. His ‘anti-memoir’ Wish I Was Here was highly acclaimed by critics and included in Book of the Year 2023 round-ups by the Guardian, Observer, Times Literary Supplement and Granta. Aside from his writing, Harrison is a former rock climber and fell runner, and was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2022. 

This is the first Booker Prize win for The End of Everything publisher, Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of independent press Profile Books, which wins with its fifth nomination for the prize.  

Fortnum & Mason, ‘the world’s most famous cornershop’, has generously hosted this year’s judging panel at its flagship London Piccadilly store for the key judging meetings. The judges met in the Boardroom on the fifth floor to choose their winner.

Speaking to the Booker Prizes website about the inspiration for The End of Everything, Harrison said: ‘The art towns of the UK’s East Coast provided the setting. I love that coast, all the way round from Hastings to the Thames – even up into Suffolk. Current affairs provided the themes and the satire: what happens when all of our expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but we still have to make a life?’ On his approach to writing, he said: ‘Writing or reading, my overall relationship with a book is always romantic.’ 

In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme, Harrison added: ‘The initial inspiration was the 2008 financial crisis […] I decided that this time I would like to write a novel about the failure of explanation in society. […] A disaster was a good starting point for that jump off.’ 

On creating the otherworldly entities in The End of Everything, he told Front Row: ‘When I designed the iGhetti, I thought, I cannot clarify them too much otherwise I will write a typical science fiction novel and I wanted to avoid that. I wanted to write a novel which was, essentially deeply ironical. I didn’t really want to know too much about the iGhetti, as aliens, as to how they got here; as to why they’re doing what they do.’ 

He goes on to explain on the programme what it means to him for a work of speculative fiction to be nominated for the Booker Prize: ‘I’m very excited that a fiction of this type should be shortlisted, and that it should have been mine. Because I have been working for 40-50 years to shift the balance, both as a novelist and as a critic. […] Why shouldn’t a well written (work of) SF (science fiction) be considered to be literary fiction?’ 

Writing in the Guardian about what he set out to achieve with The End of Everything, Harrison says: ‘I wanted this book to offer a different shape: a catastrophe the nature of which is impossible to parse, and which continues unabated for the foreseeable future. In short, actual change. Nested inside the novel are various parodies, pastiches and political metaphors; a certain amount of grotesque humour. The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong. It’s a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend.’ 

He goes on to write: ‘As a favour – and with a whispered You’re welcome! Enjoy! – I’ve passed on to the reader some of the puzzlement and confusion of the characters in the book as they face a future with the alien. I hope, though, that the issues are transparent: the collapse of rationality that comes with Trumpism and the internet, and which consciously confounds the ability to make a factual statement about anything; humanity’s inexplicable attempt to break down and abandon the environment it can’t live without; the loss of any sense that we actually know how to manage the world except via a Netflix empowerment fantasy.’ 

On writing later in life, Harrison told The Telegraph, which referred to him as a ‘cult hero’: ‘You get into this “late style” thing, where you’re writing to find out just how far you can go. This might be your last chance. This might be the last book you write.’ 

He also told The Telegraph about the new order that his characters face in The End of Everything: ‘They’re people acting out of desperation because they don’t know what the world is anymore. It seems to me that in a real catastrophe, it wouldn’t be a question of survival – the point is the world doesn’t work the way it used to. Your entire philosophy, your entire epistemology, is based on what you know. And suddenly you don’t know anything.’ 

Helen Macdonald, The Observer: ‘It’s fitting that this book has arrived in this post-pandemic, post-neoliberal, post-Brexit, post-everything summer, a time of pernicious prediction markets, AI gumming up the works, TikTokers memorialising sodium streetlights, looksmaxxers, floods, failing infrastructure, Ukrainian fields glittering with drifts of fibre-optic cable and a cage-fighting arena being built on the White House lawn. I don’t think I’ll read a better book this year, perhaps decade. The world is falling apart and The End of Everything properly fucks one up.’ 

Simon Ings, The Telegraph: ‘Harrison isn’t weirder than most other writers, just better. Reading The End of Everything, you feel you’re not so much reading as dreaming. Or, to put it another way, this novel is like a painting by Paul Nash, chalky, degreased and illumined. As Harrison himself says: by “a pure 1930s light, from an imagination stocked when people could use words like ‘spiritual’ and still mean something”.’ 

Catherine Taylor, Financial Times: ‘This is a formidable book: dusky, casually horrifying, unexpectedly compassionate. Its ending takes a deceptively conventional form, but the blank pages that follow invite the reader either to accept the end of everything as the title conveys, or imagine a continuous, ambiguous present — one that extends beyond the unexpected survivor of this particular story.’ 

Dave Kim, The New York Times: ‘a masterly exercise in restraint, unsettling beauty and elliptical writing that can enlighten even when it obfuscates. […]This grim but powerful book portrays the many incompatible states of existence, and the baffling collapse of time, that stem from extreme crises.’ 

As one man, Phillip Tennent, moves through this uncanny new world order, all of the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction fall away in favor of a far more timely and provocative proposal: The apocalypse might not be an end at all, but simply a long chain of baffling, disorienting incidents. 

Max Liu, the iPaper: ‘Harrison’s satirical barbs about the nihilistic complacency of our age are pithy and penetrating. Is the hollowed-out terrain of this novel’s world where we are heading? Or are we already there? For provoking such questions, this is a worthy contender.’ 

Hillary Kelly, The Atlantic: ‘The End of Everything is brief and confounding; it also doesn’t care a whit for the conventions of dystopian fiction. […] As one man, Phillip Tennent, moves through this uncanny new world order, all of the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction fall away in favor of a far more timely and provocative proposal: The apocalypse might not be an end at all, but simply a long chain of baffling, disorienting incidents. […] The novel is expansive rather than dismissive. It reaches out for connection, feeling at once bizarrely creative and, on a psychological level, strikingly familiar. In a short novel, in a wholly original way, Harrison has managed to sketch not just a world, but a worldview. I suspect that he knew he needed to create a new style of language and imagery to convey the emotional reality of a world “disconnected from itself.” As John Ashbery put it in 1977, “You can’t say it that way any more.” The same is true now.’ 

Vasudevan Mukunth, The Hindu: ‘Harrison is treading the same path here that he’s been on since his Viriconium series (1971-1984), but by now — he’s 81 and will become the oldest Booker laureate if he wins — he’s also joined by László Krasznahorkai and Jeff VanderMeer, among many others. Which shouldn’t be surprising: it’s a sincerely pleasant irony that the world’s increasingly overt descent into incomprehension and solipsism has also presented to each generation’s best writers the chance to become the prophets we’re looking for.’ 

 ‘Harrison’s satirical barbs about the nihilistic complacency of our age are pithy and penetrating. Is the hollowed-out terrain of this novel’s world where we are heading? Or are we already there? For provoking such questions, this is a worthy contender. 

As the winner, Harrison can expect instant international recognition, a dramatic increase in global sales and a career transformed overnight. The winner of the Booker Prize 2025, Flesh by David Szalay sold over 7,900 hardback copies in the UK in the week following its win on 10 November 2025, a 1,441% week-on-week sales increase, with combined e-book and audiobook sales in the same week totalling 15,000 copies, representing a 2,508% increase. It reached number four in the Sunday Times bestsellers chart – staying in the top 10 for 10 weeks – number one in the Times and entered the Amazon fiction Top 20 Most Sold list for the first time in the week after its win, in second place. It topped the Independent Bookshop Top 20 the following week.  

The hardback edition was the 11th bestselling fiction title in 2025 and the paperback, which was published in spring this year and spent three weeks as a Sunday Times bestseller, is in the top 15 bestselling general fiction paperbacks of the year so far. The publisher has now sold over 91,000 hardback and 75,000 paperback print copies in the UK, with total sales in all formats and all markets now over 519,000 copies. Rights deals increased from 12 before Flesh’s longlisting to a total of 42 territories now either sold or under offer. 

The celebrations for the Booker Prize 2026 began on the evening before the ceremony, Sunday, 8 November, with the annual Booker Prize shortlist readings, which took place in the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, in London, chaired by award-winning author, literary critic, screenwriter, broadcaster, podcaster and Booker Prize 2024 judge Sara Collins.  

Collins will also be in conversation with Harrison for his first public event as the winner of the Booker Prize 2026, which will take place at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle on Thursday, 12 November, hosted in partnership with New Writing North. Forum Books will be selling books at the venue, giving audience members the chance to get a signed copy of the winning book after the event, which is now sold out.  

The Booker Prize Foundation is a charity partner of ethical online bookshop BookKind. From Tuesday, 10 November until the end of the year, BookKind is offering customers 15% off Booker Prize-winning title The End of Everything. Readers can also enjoy the entire 2026 shortlist for the special price of £79, saving them £30. BookKind donates 10% of every order to the charity, supporting readers and writers of the future.