M. John Harrison has become the oldest ever winner of the Booker Prize, receiving the prestigious literary award for his post-apocalyptic novel The End of Everything. Harrison, 81, was named the winner of the £50,000 prize at a ceremony in London on Monday, surpassing Margaret Atwood as the oldest recipient in the award's history.
The End of Everything is set in the years after a mysterious catastrophe that caused British society to collapse. The story follows a man and his aunt navigating life on the south-east English coast in the aftermath of an unexplained disaster and the arrival of mysterious alien beings. Harrison has said he deliberately omitted explanations about the background events to make readers feel the same disorientation as the characters, calling it a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend.
Dame Mary Beard, who chaired the Booker judges, said the book turns readers upside down and surprisingly leaves them with a twinge of optimism given the subject matter. Booker Prize chief executive Gaby Wood described Harrison as the first Booker winner to have emerged from the science fiction world, calling The End of Everything a realist book about a strange world populated by desperate, unmoored characters. The book has divided readers, with critics variously describing it as baffling, brilliant, and tender and terrifying in equal parts.
Harrison, who has built a cult following over his 60-year career, began writing in the 1960s and has published 13 novels, five short story collections, and what he calls an anti-memoir. He told BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday that he wanted to write a book satirizing the present-day barrage of information without the necessary tools to understand it. The Booker Prize judges reached a unanimous decision after what Dame Mary described as a day of discussion, disagreement, and debate over six shortlisted novels.