BRITISH author M John Harrison was named the winner of the 2026 Booker Prize for his dystopian satire ‘The End of Everything’ at a ceremony here on Monday night. Aged 81, Harrison becomes the oldest author to win the prestigious literary prize after a writing career spanning 60 years. Just 198 pages, ‘The End of Everything’ was also the shortest novel on this year’s shortlist and won because judges felt it is a book that “leaves you with a twinge of optimism” about the world.

 

“I feel like a proper writer at last, totally lacking in confidence,” said Harrison. “Prizes like this one, not that there are any prizes quite like the Booker, are so important in a landscape of industrialised fiction,” he said. Fiction authors from the UK dominated the shortlist of the 2026 Booker, including Scottish American past winner Douglas Stuart - shortlisted this year for ‘John of John’. Another past winner of the prize, Jamaican author Marlon James, was in the running with ‘The Disappearers’.