‘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.’

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus is a British-Jamaican poet, educator, and writer. He was diagnosed as deaf at age six; his work explores themes of sound, language, identity, and memory.

Antrobus is the author of several poetry collections, including Shapes & Disfigurements (2012), To Sweeten Bitter (2017), The Perseverance (2018), All The Names Given (2021), and Signs, Music (2024). His poems have been published in The New Yorker, the Guardian, Granta, the London Review of Books, The Poetry Review, Poetry Foundation, Lit Hub, and The Deaf Poets Society. His work has also appeared on BBC 2, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, and Channel 4. 

In 2019, Antrobus became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. He has won the Ted Hughes Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Guardian Poetry Book of the Year 2018, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. He has also been shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Forward Prize. His poems ‘Jamaican British’, ‘The Perseverance’, ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ and ‘With Birds You’re Never Lonely’ have been added to the UK’s GCSE syllabus.  

His debut picture book, Can Bears Ski?, illustrated by Polly Dunbar, was selected as an Ezra Jack Keats honouree winner in 2021. That same year Antrobus hosted the BBC Radio 4 documentary, Inventions in Sounds, and performed at the Paralympic Homecoming ceremony at Wembley Stadium. In 2025 his first art installation was shown at the Barbican as part of the exhibition ‘Feel The Sound’, and he published a highly-acclaimed memoir, The Quiet Ear. 

Antrobus has served as an ambassador for The Poetry School and Arts Emergency, and was a board member of English PEN. Currently, he advocates for D/deaf charities, including Deaf Kidz International, the National Deaf Children’s Society and the Royal National Institute for Deaf People. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed MBE for services to literature in 2021. 

Jarvis Cocker

Jarvis Cocker is a musician and broadcaster from the north of England. He formed the band Pulp in 1978, whilst at secondary school. The band went on to become one of the most successful UK music groups of the 1990s. 

Between 2009 and 2017 he presented the BBC Radio 6 Music programme Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service, as well as the ongoing, award-winning BBC Radio 4 documentary series Wireless Nights. He has interviewed authors including Salman Rushdie, Edna O’Brien, Nick Hornby and Miranda July. He was an editor-at-large at Faber between 2012 and 2014. 

Cocker has honorary doctorates from both Sheffield Hallam University and Central Saint Martin’s School of Art (which he attended from 1988 to 1991). 

His lyric collection Mother, Brother, Lover was published by Faber in 2011. Good Pop, Bad Pop, his first work of long-form prose, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2022. 

Cocker appeared in a Booker Prize 2022 shortlist film, performing an extract from Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. 

Rebecca Liu

Rebecca Liu is a writer, critic, and editor at the Guardian Saturday magazine. Her essays and criticism about books and arts have been published in the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation, the White Review, and Critical Quarterly – to which she contributed an essay on John Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel G. for the John Berger centenary issue. 

Liu has interviewed writers including Bernardine Evaristo, Xiaolu Guo, Kiley Reid, and Jacqueline Rose, and artists including Park Chan-wook, Carly Rae Jepsen, Darren Star, and Sandra Oh. She chairs literary events, often for the UK’s East and Southeast Asian Literary Festival, and has discussed books and arts on BBC radio programmes. 

Liu was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Auckland and Hong Kong before studying history and east Asian studies at the University of Chicago, and political thought and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. 

She was previously assistant editor at Prospect magazine, and produced and co-hosted the Prospect podcast, where she interviewed authors including Natasha Brown, Avni Doshi, and Amia Srinivasan. She was also previously a staff critic at Another Gaze film journal, and an editor at the King’s Review magazine. 

Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood is an American novelist, poet and essayist. Lockwood’s books include the novel No One Is Talking About This, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2021, and was one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2021.

Her other books are the memoir Priestdaddy, one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2017; and the poetry collections Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals and Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. 

Lockwood’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New Republic and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. Her most recent novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, was published in 2025. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.