M John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything, a novel about life after the collapse of British society that makes uncertainty central to its account of catastrophe. He was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Monday. The decision recognises a writer with a longstanding cult readership whose work resists easy classification, and a book whose difficulty the judges acknowledged rather than sought to minimise.

At 81, Harrison is the oldest author to receive the £50,000 award, overtaking Margaret Atwood. The honour comes after a 60-year career encompassing 13 novels, five collections of short stories and a work described as an “anti-memoir”. His selection from a shortlist of six was unanimous after a full day of deliberation, according to the judging panel. Those figures place the award in the context of an extensive writing career, rather than an early breakthrough.

Harrison began writing in the 1960s, before the Booker Prize was established in 1969. His relationship with literary categories is an important part of the significance of this year's result: he dislikes being assigned to science fiction or fantasy, yet Booker Prize chief executive Gaby Wood identified him as “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world”. The distinction places his literary background alongside the judges' assessment of the individual novel, without resolving his resistance to such labels.

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The End of Everything takes place in the years following an unexplained catastrophe that has dismantled familiar British society. Its focus, in Harrison's account, is not simply the event or its aftermath, but the inability of people to understand what has happened around them. “The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong,” he has said. He also described deliberately giving readers some of the bewilderment experienced by characters confronting a future involving the alien.

Explaining his intentions on Tuesday, Harrison said he wanted to satirise the volume of information people encounter without having the means to interpret or critically assess it. The disaster therefore concerns explanation and comprehension, not only the collapse of a society. That account offers a way into the novel's demanding construction: the reader's uncertainty is connected to the subject Harrison set out to explore. The difficulty is not separate from his depiction of people struggling to make sense of their circumstances.

Dame Mary Beard, who chaired the judges, defended that challenge while pointing to qualities beyond the novel's bleak setting. “It's a challenging read, but some of the best fiction is challenging,” she said. In her assessment, the book unsettles its audience but also offers humour and an unexpected measure of optimism. That response provides a counterweight to the division among readers: the panel's endorsement did not depend on presenting the novel as straightforward or suggesting that its disturbing subject matter determines its entire emotional effect.

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Wood offered a related interpretation, presenting the novel as a realist book about a strange world, unsettling but not itself strange. “He is a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously,” she said of Harrison. She described the book's characters as desperate and disoriented. Her comments and Beard's account emphasise different aspects of the novel: Wood highlighted its realism and unmoored characters, while Beard found humour and optimism alongside its challenging qualities.

The unanimous outcome followed a judging process marked by disagreement. When the shortlist was announced in September, Beard made clear that reaching the final six had been difficult. Fellow judge Patricia Lockwood, the US novelist, described “tossing books across the room” during judging sessions, while poet Raymond Antrobus called the selection “a tussle”. The panel also included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker and journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu. Beard said the final meeting involved substantial debate, adding: “But nobody stomped off.”

The other shortlisted novels were 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. Beard said the judges devoted a whole day to discussing the six books before choosing Harrison. The award is made annually for the best novel written in English and published in the year ending on 30 September, giving the decision a defined publication window rather than the scope of a career honour.

For readers coming to Harrison through the prize, the judges' comments offer guidance rather than a promise of easy answers. Their choice leaves intact the tension between the novel's demanding form and the humour and hope Beard found within it. Harrison's own explanation likewise directs attention towards failures of understanding. The Booker recognition endorses that approach; it does not remove the uncertainty that the author deliberately asks his readers to share with his characters.