The End of Everything wins Booker for fiction

10 NOVEMBER 2026

British writer M. John Harrison won the Booker Prize for fiction for The End of Everything, a satirical dystopian novel whose themes of “catastrophe and apocalypse” chime with our uneasy times.
It is the first work of science fiction to take the prestigious $67,000 literary award, but 81-year-old Harrison said he doesn’t want to be hemmed in by the sci-fi label.
He said Booker recognition after six decades as an author shows that the era of “genres as fences and boxes, pigeonholes, is over”.
“I think this book shows, and the prize now shows, that it is very possible to write a book that mixes not just two genres, but three or four,” Mr. Harrison said.

End of Everything

The End of Everything is set on England’s Channel coast in the near future, after an unspecified calamity has shattered society and brought an influx of enigmatic alien entities to Britain.
It centres on a beachcomber who lives with his gun-toting aunt and discovers a puzzling, shape-shifting artifact on the shore.
Critics have praised the book’s dark humour, though some have been confused by its elusive narrative.