Rugby-born M John Harrison, 81, wins the Booker Prize, the first science fiction author to do so

M John Harrison, the writer born in Rugby, Warwickshire, has won the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything, becoming the first author from the world of science fiction to take the award, and, at 81, its oldest ever winner.

Harrison received the £50,000 prize and trophy at a ceremony in London on Monday evening, 9 November, The Guardian reported. It was his first Booker nomination.

"A historic win"

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while plenty of previous winners had dabbled in science fiction, Harrison was "the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world". She called it "a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page".

Harrison overtakes Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the prize in 2019 for The Testaments, as the oldest winner.

The book

The End of Everything is set on the Kent coast a few decades from now, years after a disaster nobody can properly explain. It follows Phillip Tennent and his ageing aunt Marnie as they try to survive alongside the iGhetti, vast, shape-changing beings whose origins and intentions are never explained. At 198 pages, it was the shortest book on the shortlist.

The historian Mary Beard, who chaired the judges, said the decision was unanimous, reached after a full day of discussion. "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," she said. "This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future."

Six decades of writing

Harrison was born in Rugby in 1945, sold his first story in 1965 and spent much of the 1970s running the books pages of the speculative fiction magazine New Worlds. His earlier honours include the Boardman Tasker prize for mountain literature for Climbers in 1989, the Arthur C Clarke award for Nova Swing in 2007, and the Goldsmiths prize for The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again in 2020. A keen climber and fell runner in his younger days, he was himself a Booker judge in 2022.

He has long argued that good science fiction deserves to be treated as literary fiction. "Why shouldn't a well written [work of] SF be considered to be literary fiction?" he asked on BBC Radio 4's Front Row last month.

A win for an independent publisher

The novel is published by Serpent's Tail, an imprint of the independent publisher Profile Books, and it is the imprint's first Booker win. The judging panel, which also included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and the authors Patricia Lockwood and Raymond Antrobus, considered 163 books.

The shortlist also included Marlon James's The Disappearers, Douglas Stuart's John of John, Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, Luke Kennard's Black Bag and Rebecca Perry's debut May We Feed the King. Even admirers admit the winner is not an easy read, but for readers in Birmingham and the surrounding area there is a local angle to enjoy: the oldest winner in the prize's history began life just down the road in Rugby.