Booker and ‘The End of Everything’: When the world unravels but refuses to say why

Harrison dispenses with the conventions of dystopia — there are no neatly catalogued monsters, no arc of redemption, no reassuring explanation. Instead, he shores up mordant humour and unnerving ordinariness

At 81, Harrison is the oldest winner in the Prize’s history.

2 min readNov 12, 2026 06:16 AM IST First published on: Nov 12, 2026 at 06:16 AM IST

This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper,” T S Eliot wrote in ‘The Hollow Men’ in 1925. A century later, another British writer, M John Harrison, would locate the end of the world in the apocalypse becoming a condition of living. The result is The End of Everything, winner of this year’s Booker Prize, lauded by the jury as “shimmering and oblique”.

At 81, Harrison is the oldest winner in the Prize’s history. More significantly, he is the first science-fiction writer to win it. But that’s a distinction that might irk the writer who has resisted the borders between science fiction, literary modernism, and fantasy. He has helped shape what has come to be known as the New Weird: A mode of speculative writing that leans into the ambiguity, estrangement and unstable nature of reality. Harrison’s literary inheritance runs through J G Ballard and Franz Kafka, but his voice is distinctively original. The End of Everything is set in a near future ravaged by an inexplicable catastrophe, in a world inhabited by mysterious, shape-shifting entities called the iGhetti. Harrison dispenses with the conventions of dystopia — there are no neatly catalogued monsters, no arc of redemption, no reassuring explanation. Instead, he shores up mordant humour and unnerving ordinariness. It makes the unravelling of the world feel intimate, almost domestic, both an end and not quite.

At the award ceremony, however, Harrison channelled a different kind of weird: “I really didn’t expect to be up here this evening… here at the end of everything… You talk glibly about your life being changed, but it’s weird when it happens. I feel like a proper writer at last, totally lacking in confidence.”