M. John Harrison Wins the 2026 Booker Prize at 81, the Oldest Winner in the History of the Award
The dystopian novel The End of Everything won among 163 submitted books. The prize is 50,000 pounds, and the author had never been shortlisted before.
London – English writer M. John Harrison won the 2026 Booker Prize for the novel The End of Everything. At 81, he is the oldest winner in the history of the award. The prize was presented at a ceremony in London on November 9.
The prize is worth 50,000 pounds. The novel was chosen from 163 submitted books.
The End of Everything is a dystopian story about a man and his aunt in southern England, several decades after a mysterious invasion led to the collapse of society. A scavenger finds an alien object on a beach and brings it to his aunt, whose memory is failing. She senses that the object is growing.
The chair of the judges, classicist Mary Beard, described the book as “the politics of now seen through the lens of the future”.
Harrison has been writing science fiction and fantasy for about 60 years. His 2006 novel Nova Swing won the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick awards. In 2022 he was a member of the Booker Prize jury, and he himself had never been shortlisted before.
His books also include Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989, and the novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize. The publisher of the winning novel is Serpent’s Tail, for which this is the first Booker Prize.
Besides Beard, the jury included poet Raymond Antrobus, musician Jarvis Cocker, critic Rebecca Liu and writer Patricia Lockwood. Beard also praised the author’s “extraordinary, expert writing and huge ambition”.
After the win he said he feels “like a proper writer at last, totally lacking in confidence”.
Five more books were on the shortlist: The Disappearers by Marlon James, Black Bag by Luke Kennard, May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout and John of John by Douglas Stuart. By the editorial calculation, the six books in the final are less than four percent of all those submitted.
What was not announced: whether the novel will be translated into Macedonian and when. No such information has been published.
MKNews Hub · Macedonia · November 11, 2026
