English author M. John Harrison wins the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything
The annual U.K. prize honours best novel written in English from anywhere in the world.
Annual U.K. prize honours best novel written in English from anywhere in the world
CBC News
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English author M. John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize for his novel The End of Everything, a post-apocalyptic adventure that explores what it means to be human in a shifting world.
The £50,000 (approx. $94,893 Cdn) prize annually recognizes the best original novel written in the English language and published in the U.K.
The End of Everything is set in a slow-collapsing, near-future landscape along the Kent coast of the U.K. Years after an obscure, world-altering crisis, governments across the world barely function and the seas teem with strange new life.
Harrison becomes the first sci-fi author to win the award.
Harrison is an author and literary critic. He sold his first story in 1965, and in 1969 joined the staff of the U.K. speculative fiction magazine New Worlds, where he edited the books pages until 1978.
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.
This year's Booker Prize jury is comprised of poet, writer and educator Raymond Antrobus, musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker, journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu and poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood.
The jury is chaired by English classicist, writer and broadcaster Mary Beard.
The shortlist also included Jamaican author Marlon James's The Disappearers, Scottish author Douglas Stuart’s John of John, U.K. poet and writer Luke Kennard's Black Bag, English writer Rebecca Perry's May We Feed the King and American author Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say.
The six-book shortlist was whittled down from a longlist of 13. Shortlisted writers will receive £2,500 (approx. $4,692 Cdn) and a specially bound copy of their book.
There are no Canadians on this year's list.
Since 2013, authors from any nationality have been eligible for the Booker Prize.
In 2025, Montreal-born author David Szalay won the Booker prize for his novel Flesh.
Two other Canadians have won the prize since its inception in 1969: Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English Patient and Yann Martel in 2002 for Life of Pi.
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