M. John Harrison
2022 Booker Prize Judge
M. John Harrison, a genre-defying author and literary critic, 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; ghostwritten on behalf of a legendary British rock climber; and served on juries for the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Edinburgh Film Festival.