A man with long white hair and a white goatee looks into the camera. He is wearing a black v neck t-shirt on a black background and has tanned white skin. His eyes are a blueish green.

M. John Harrison

Prizes judged: The Booker Prize 2022

M. John Harrison is a genre-defying British author and literary critic

Harrison has been hailed by writers including Olivia Laing, Robert MacFarlane and Neil Gaiman as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today.

He sold his first story in 1965, and in 1969 joined the staff of the UK speculative fiction magazine New Worlds, where he edited the books pages until 1978.

His 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. A collection of short stories, You Should Come With Me Now, was published in 2017, and a volume of selected stories written between 1970 and 2020 was published under the title Settling the World. 
 
He has reviewed a broad spread of fiction for the TLS, the Telegraph, the Guardian and the New York Times; co-authored a quartet of fantasy novels about talking cats; and ghostwritten on behalf of a legendary British rock climber. He was a judge of the Booker Prize 2022.

The End of Everything was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.

M. John Harrison on The End of Everything

‘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?’

Read the full interview here.