Winner of the 2026 Booker Prize, M. John Harrison (credit: the Booker Prize).
By Andrew Richard Albanese, Editor-in-Chief
At a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London on November 9, The End of Everything by British author M. John Harrison was named the winner of the Booker Prize 2026. The event was broadcast live in a special episode of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, hosted by Samira Ahmed. It was also livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ YouTube and Instagram channels, with additional red-carpet coverage posted on the Booker Prizes’ social accounts (You can watch the livestream here).
A genre-defying British author and literary critic, Harrison has been hailed by fellow writers as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today. His previous 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.
Billed as by independent publisher Serpent’s Tail as “a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding,” The End of Everything, at 198 pages, was the shortest book on this year’s shortlist. And, at 81, Harrison now becomes the oldest winner in the history of the prize (beating out Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she jointly won the 2019 Booker Prize for The Testaments).
It is also the first Booker Prize win for Harrison’s publisher, Serpent’s Tail (an imprint of independent press Profile Books), after five nominations.
“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,” Mary Beard, Chair of the Booker Prize 2026 judges, said, in a statement. “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.”
In addition to Harrison’s winner, the Booker Prize 2026 shortlist, drawn from some 163 entrants, also included: 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.
Harrison, as the winning author takes home a £50,000 prize and a trophy, originally designed by children’s author and illustrator Jan Pieńkowski in 1969, and named “Iris” (after 1978 Booker Prize winner Iris Murdoch) in a public vote. Each shortlisted author will each receive £2,500.
Recognized as one of the most prestigious literary honors in the world, The Booker Prize is open to authors from anywhere in the world, writing in English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland. Previous winners of the prize include Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Paul Beatty, Bernardine Evaristo and Samantha Harvey.
Speaking to the Booker Prizes website Harrison said that current affairs provided the themes for the book: “what happens when all of our expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but we still have to make a life?” he said.
‘An Engine of Attention’
During the ceremony, which Harrison attended the ceremony along with all of the other shortlisted authors, last year’s winner David Szalay described his year as a Booker Prize winner.
“We live in a world characterized by a terrifyingly fierce struggle for attention,” he said. “In that environment, the Booker Prize is something for which I think we should all be grateful. Because the Booker is basically an engine of attention, able to bestow that attention on anything but choosing to bestow it on things that might otherwise struggle to get much of a hearing—those nuanced, complex, ridiculously longform things called novels. And that’s important because the novel is, I believe, still among the most profound and rigorous ways our culture has of thinking about itself, and to lose it would be to lose a significant part of our communal mind.”
The evening also included a screening of six short films featuring actors reading extracts from the Booker Prize 2026 shortlisted books. All six films can be watched here, and the film of the winning book here.
Next up, on Thursday, November 12, the Queen will host a morning reception at Clarence House to celebrate the Booker Prize 2026, and the inaugural year of the Children’s Booker Prize. The shortlist for the Children’s Booker Prize 2027, supported by AKO Foundation will be announced on November 24.
