M. John Harrison wins the Booker Prize 2026
The Booker judges spent a whole day debating the six great novels on this year’s shortlist, before agreeing unanimously to award the 2026 prize to The End of Everything by M. John Harrison.
It’s a book that turns you upside down, raises a wry smile – and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism. Central to the story are Phillip Tennent and his elderly aunt Marnie, living on the south coast of England, a few decades into the future, some years after a mysterious catastrophe: an invasion of “iGhetti” (the “i” hinting at something digital, but you can’t be sure).
Social norms have been eroded, law and order have fallen into the hands of vigilantes, and you may well have a crashed plane lodged in your garden. People try to muddle through nonetheless, even making a show of business as usual (children’s parties and a morning coffee at a seaside café).
Some try desperately to make sense of what has happened. But one main point of the book is that if, or when, such an apocalypse comes it will be incomprehensible. And the old rules won’t matter either. Phillip is landed with an “item” he found on the beach, a blob of jelly which quickly grows, develops speech and starts to tell his human minders what to do. This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.
Mary Beard, Chair of the Booker Prize 2026 judges
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What is The End of Everything about?
A slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure, The End of Everything pushes readers to the limits of human understanding.
Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It’s been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscured. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.
Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can’t keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.
Who is M. John Harrison?
M. John Harrison at the Booker Prize 2026 shortlist readings, at the Southbank Centre © David Parry for the Booker Prize Foundation
M. John Harrison is a British author and literary critic. The End of Everything is his first nomination for the Booker Prize. Harrison has been hailed by writers including Olivia Laing, Robert MacFarlane and Neil Gaiman as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today.
His novels include Climbers, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature in 1989; Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2007; and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which won the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize for innovation in fiction. A collection of short stories, You Should Come With Me Now, was published in 2017, and a volume of selected stories written between 1970 and 2020 was published under the title Settling the World. He was a judge of the Booker Prize 2022.
Speaking to the Booker Prizes, Harrison detailed the inspiration for The End of Everything: ‘The art towns of the UK’s East Coast provided the setting. I love that coast, all the way round from Hastings to the Thames – even up into Suffolk.’
‘Current affairs provided the themes and the satire: what happens when all of our expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but we still have to make a life?’
Read an extract from The End of Everything
‘For years Phillip Tennent lived at the edge of the sea, where artefacts were washed up every day. Scavengers, professional and otherwise, came and went. Turnover was higher than you’d expect given the relaxed lifestyle, the constant good weather, the ease with which some sort of existence could be pursued.
Most of the beachcombers took away the first item they could easily carry and sold it on elsewhere. If you had contacts in the hinterland, there was no doubt about how slickly that could be done. But the hard core like Tennent hung on, out there dawn and dusk, shine or shine, throwing the small ones back, waiting for an item that would give them pause for thought. They were committed. They could be seen from orbit. Their living structures glowed at night a hundred miles up and down the coast. By day you saw that temporary qualities had defined over the decades a permanent aesthetic: bothies and benders made of whitened sticks; mirrors and bits of rag; almost anything the tide left, although to incorporate an artefact would have been considered bad taste as much as bad luck. The beachcombers had their limits. Their superstitions gave the tideline its social structures and distinctive quality on the palate.’
What did the panel of judges say about The End of Everything?
The Booker Prize 2026 judges with the shortlist © Dave Parry for the Booker Prize Foundation
‘Two beachcombers meet and exchange words at the intertidal; we are in Kent, and it is the near-future, but one that recognises itself to be in the middle of a catastrophe. The sky is glitching, and something strange, formless and growing is soon to come out of the sea, to imitate our speech, forms, and customs. Our left-behind inhabitants scavenge where and what they can, provisional alliances are made and broken, shocking violence occurs, and no one can agree on exactly what has happened. A book not just about everything but about now. Shimmering and oblique, it holds the reader to the surface of something very grave and deep.’
