'Baffling but brilliant' post-apocalyptic novel The End of Everything wins Booker Prize

Author M John Harrison has become the oldest ever winner of the Booker Prize, picking up the prestigious literary award for his post-apocalyptic novel The End of Everything.

Harrison, 81, who has built a cult following over his 60-year career, was named the winner of the £50,000 prize at a ceremony in London on Monday.

The End of Everything is set in the years after a mysterious catastrophe that caused British society as we know it to collapse. It has divided opinion among readers, and was described as "bleak but brilliant" and "dreamlike and baffling" by one critic.

Dame Mary Beard, who chaired the Booker judges, said: "It's a challenging read, but some of the best fiction is challenging."

Dame Mary added: "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."

Harrison began writing in the 1960s and has published 13 novels, five short story collections and an "anti-memoir". He has now surpassed Margaret Atwood as the oldest ever Booker winner.

While he dislikes labels like science fiction and fantasy, he has been called "the titan of literary science fiction", and Booker Prize chief executive Gaby Wood said he is "the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world".

"He is a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously," Wood said.

"Though very unsettling, The End of Everything is not in fact a strange book. It's a realist book about a strange world, populated by desperate, unmoored characters."

• Listen back to a special edition of BBC Radio 4 Front Row from the Booker Prize ceremony

'Tender, terrifying and timely'

The story follows a man and his aunt who must muddle through on the south-east English coast in the aftermath of an unexplained disaster and the arrival of mysterious alien beings.

The author has said he deliberately omitted as much explanation about the background to the events as possible, in order to make readers feel the same disorientation as the characters.

He has said: "The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong. It's a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend."

He added: "I've passed on to the reader some of the puzzlement and confusion of the characters in the book as they face a future with the alien."

That approach has led to a mixed reaction. The Guardian praised the book but said, external "it won't be for everyone", while the New York Times said, external: "The more we learn about the conditions of this novel's broken world, the harder it is to grasp."

The Literary Review described it as, external "a work of uncanny beauty, tender and terrifying in equal parts", while the Telegraph said, external "you feel you're not so much reading as dreaming".

Another Telegraph critic wrote, external that it was "ultimately, in both skill and humour, a cut above" the other shortlisted books.

"And in an age when AI overlords keep threatening to kill us, and the Government has told us to stockpile tinned food and bottled water, it is, for once, a novel that you can genuinely call 'timely'."

The Booker Prize is an annual award for the best novel written in the English language and published in the year up to 30 September. It was launched in 1969.

This year's other shortlisted books were:

• The Disappearers by Marlon James

• Black Bag by Luke Kennard

• May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry

• The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

• John of John by Douglas Stuart

When the shortlist was announced in September, Dame Mary said agreeing on the final six had been, "to put it mildly, hard work".

Another judge, US novelist Patricia Lockwood, said she had been "tossing books across the room" during judging sessions, while poet Raymond Antrobus described the selection as "a tussle".

The other judges were Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, and journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu.

Speaking about the final judging session, Dame Mary told reporters on Monday: "There was a lot of discussion, disagreement and debate. But nobody stomped off."

In a statement, she said the panel "spent a whole day debating the six remarkable novels on this year's shortlist" before reaching a unanimous decision to name Harrison the winner.