Every year the Booker Prize ends with a single name, and this year that name caught a lot of people off guard: “The End of Everything” by M. John Harrison. At 81, after a fifty-year career much adored in science-fiction circles but rarely courted by the literary establishment, Harrison became the oldest winner in the prize’s history — for what is, by common agreement, the strangest and most divisive book on the shortlist. I’ll admit I gasped along with the room. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see it coming.
Where it began
Back in July, when I made my longlist predictions, I flagged “The End of Everything” as a title that “might seem an outsider choice, but actually I think is quite likely.” Something about it felt like exactly the kind of book this year’s judges might reach for. So when Mary Beard, chair of the judges, read out the title, part of me was stunned and part of me was quietly nodding. That’s the strange pleasure of following a prize from the very start of its season: you get to watch your own early hunches either curdle or come good over four long months.
And what a season of reading it was. I read the entire longlist this year — something I rarely manage — simply because I couldn’t bear not to know. Prize season is the engine that drives me to books I’d otherwise never reach, and this year it delivered an embarrassment of riches: I had enough five-star reads to fill a shortlist of my own.
Ranking the shortlist with Bob
Before the ceremony I sat down with my friend Bob the Bookerer to rank the six shortlisted books, each of us revealing our cards at the same time like a literary game show. It was uncanny how closely we aligned — and tellingly, we both put the same book at number one: Marlon James’s “The Disappearers.” My heart was with it all season. I so wanted to see James take a second Booker; I even placed a bet on it (and, because I’d just discovered that his partner Nicholas Boggs was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford with his Baldwin biography, a joint wager on the two of them winning their respective prizes — a lovely idea undone when the Baillie Gifford went to Edmund Richardson’s “Alexander” instead).
But the head and the heart are rarely the same in Booker season. My heart wanted “The Disappearers”; my head suspected the judges were leaning somewhere weirder.
The ceremony
I feel enormously lucky to have been invited to the ceremony itself, held at Old Billingsgate, and I spent the evening filming everything I could — the behind-the-scenes glamour, the nerves, and the pinch-me thrill of actually speaking to some of the shortlisted authors.
I talked with Marlon James about why queer experience sits at the heart of his novel — “subtract the queer, you don’t have much art left,” he told me — and about how, for all its harrowing subject matter, he sees the book as “an act of restoration.” I asked Luke Kennard whether the anonymous narrator of “Black Bag” would ever reveal himself at a ceremony like this; he decided the man would “attach an internal padlock” and double down on the bag. And I spoke with Douglas Stuart about whether the characters of “John of John” could handle all this attention — which led, joyously, to us agreeing that the novel’s Grandma Ella would be the life of the party and the evening’s natural “new gay icon.” I chatted with Elizabeth Strout and her lovely husband James about life back in Maine where I grew up and the fantastic success of her novel “The Things We Never Say”.
The speeches were their own pleasure. Last year’s winner, David Szalay, returned to reflect on the “terrifyingly fierce struggle for attention” that defines our moment, calling the Booker “an engine of attention” that chooses to bestow it on the nuanced, complex, ridiculously long-form things we call novels. The poet-judge Raymond Antrobus performed a commissioned poem in the voice of a dystopian AI that ended, movingly, “Tell me a story. Make it sacred.” And Mary Beard, in announcing the winner, gently dismantled the lazy line that this year’s shortlist was simply “about the crisis of masculinity in 2026” — brilliant books, she reminded us, are always more complicated than that.
The winner
So why “The End of Everything”? The judges, by their own account, wanted something strange — Jarvis Cocker said he’d come in looking for “something weird that only a human being could write.” Harrison’s novel is certainly that: a singular, uncategorisable dystopia set on the Kent coast, where society hasn’t so much collapsed as quietly surrendered its will to a force called the iGhetti that may be alien, may be the internet made flesh, and is never quite explained.
I read it before it was even longlisted, and I was bewildered, confused, and frustrated by it. And yet something about its vibe lodged itself in me — that uncomfortable, all-too-recognisable feeling of sliding into a future we can’t control while the big machines and corporations run the show and the rest of us scurry about in the background. It is not a book that hands you easy answers, and I completely understand why so many readers have been actively hostile towards it. Plenty will call this a wilfully perverse choice by the judges. In a way, it is. But it’s also a win for a book that refuses the templated and the simplified — and after a season spent reading so widely, I find I rather admire the nerve of it, even if it wasn’t my own hoped-for winner.
Why I follow the prizes
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to: for me, the Booker has never really been about the winner. It’s about the journey — the months of reading, the arguments and agreements with other readers, the way a single shortlist can pull you into six worlds you’d never otherwise have entered. This year gave me all of that, plus the genuine honour of standing in a room full of writers whose books have meant so much to me, and getting to tell a few of them so to their faces.
What a surprising end. What a wonderful season. Now — have you read “The End of Everything,” or are you tempted to give it a try? I’d love to know where you land on this year’s most divisive winner.
