M. John Harrison, 81, becomes the oldest winner of the Booker Prize

British writer M. John Harrison, 81, has won the 2026 Booker Prize for "The End of Everything", becoming the oldest person to win the award.

He is two years older than Margaret Atwood was when she won in 2019. The book is his 13th novel, and he beat five other finalists, including previous winners Douglas Stuart and Marlon James, who had been the bookmakers' favourites, and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.

Judging chair Mary Beard, the historian, said the panel was unanimous and that the decision was not driven by age. "We thought this was a book that had earned it," she said, adding that the prize is "not a lifetime achievement award". The judges also included the poet Raymond Antrobus and the singer Jarvis Cocker, and met for four or five hours to choose a winner. "There was a lot of discussion and disagreement and debate, but nobody stomped off," Beard said.

The novel is a satirical dystopia set on England's Channel coast in the near future, where an unexplained calamity has shattered society and strange alien entities have arrived. It follows a beachcomber who lives with his aunt and finds a shapeshifting artefact on the shore. Beard described it as "the politics of now seen through the lens of the future".

Harrison has long worked in speculative fiction and won the Arthur C. Clarke award for an earlier novel, Nova Swing. Before the result he said he had been "working for 40 to 50 years to shift the balance, both as a novelist and as a critic", and asked why a well-written work of science fiction should not be considered literary fiction.

Booker Prize Foundation chief executive Gaby Wood said the prize has removed references to "literary fiction" from its materials because "all fiction is literary". Beard called the win recognition that great books can be found in every genre.

The novel is narrated through a beachcomber, Phillip Tennent, who finds one of the alien entities' artefacts washed up on the Kent coast. The object begins to copy human behaviour and appearance, and he sets off on a road trip around the south east of England with his ageing, forgetful aunt Marnie. The aliens, called the iGhetti, are confined to London's Square Mile, according to a review in MiNDFOOD by Tim Jarvis, a creative writing lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University.

Harrison's career spans about 60 years. His early stories were associated with the new wave of British science fiction in the 1960s and 70s, centred on Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine. In his 2023 "anti-memoir", Wish I Was Here, he wrote that "story is fine, but plot is like chemical farming".