M John Harrison wins Booker Prize, becoming its oldest winner at 81

The winner and the prize

M John Harrison, 81, won the Booker Prize on Monday, 9 November, with The End of Everything, a dystopian novel set on the near-future Kent coast. The announcement came at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London, where Harrison received £50,000 and a trophy presented by David Szalay, last year's winner. The novel depicts a mysterious invasion by shapeshifting entities during a societal collapse. At 198 pages it was the shortest of the six shortlisted books. Harrison, whose full name is Michael John Harrison, had also served as a Booker judge in 2022. The book's publisher, Serpent's Tail, won the prize for the first time after five earlier nominations.

A record age and a genre shift

Harrison is now the oldest winner in the prize's history, passing Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she received the award in 2019. He began his writing career in the 1960s, when he discussed with other science fiction writers the genre's poor reputation. In a BBC Radio 4 interview he recalled asking why a well-written science fiction work should not be considered literary fiction. He said he had spent 40 to 50 years working to shift that balance, both as a novelist and as a critic.

Gaby Wood, the prize's chief executive, said in a news release that Harrison is 'the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide S.F. world', unlike past winners such as Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose books 'borrowed facets' of the genre. Wood also described Harrison as '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.”

Judges and shortlist

The six-book shortlist was revealed on 22 September. The judging panel was chaired by the classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard and also included the poet Raymond Antrobus, the musician Jarvis Cocker, a Guardian critic and editor, and the American writer Patricia Lockwood. Beard said the judges spent a whole day debating the six novels before agreeing on the winner.

“In the view of the judges, it was a unanimous decision.”

Beard said the winning book came out ahead for its 'extraordinary expert writing' as well as its 'huge ambition'. In a statement quoted by The New York Times, she said the novel 'turns you upside down' and leaves readers 'with a twinge of optimism'. She described the book as 'the politics of now seen through the lens of the future'.

The book itself

The Irish Examiner described the novel as 'a dystopian satire that probes the limits of human understanding'. Wood said the book contains many tropes from cinema, including the disaster movie, the road movie and the apocalypse, yet is 'a realist book about a strange world'. Serpent's Tail's first Booker win therefore comes with a title that the judges and the prize's chief executive both framed as a novel in full command of its form.