M John Harrison, 81, Wins Booker for 13th Novel, the Prize’s First Sci-Fi Victor
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Nov 11
M John Harrison, 81, Wins Booker for 13th Novel, the Prize’s First Sci-Fi Victor
3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Nov 11
Summary
M John Harrison set a Booker record at 81, winning fiction’s top prize for The End of Everything, his 13th novel.
The 58-year-old award had never before gone to a sci-fi novel; Harrison said the win showed an "SF-adjacent" book could be treated as serious literature.
The End of Everything took about 15 years to write and depicts a collapsing Britain after an alien invasion, drawing on AI, environmental breakdown, capitalism and the refugee crisis.
Harrison, long admired in literary science fiction but not a household name, had already gained wider recognition with the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize and a stint as a 2022 Booker judge.
The win caps a career Harrison says has pursued one goal since 1965: breaking down genre boundaries between science fiction and literary fiction.