Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while plenty of previous winners had dabbled in science fiction, Harrison’s was “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world”. She called it “a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page”.
Harrison, who has been publishing for six decades, overtakes Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the prize in 2019 for The Testaments. He received the £50,000 award and trophy at a ceremony in London on Monday evening.
