The Booker Prize has been awarded to M John Harrison for The End of Everything, a dystopian novel about a man and his aunt in southern England in the aftermath of a mysterious invasion.
Harrison, who is 81, becomes the oldest winner in the prize's history. He received the prize of 50,000 pounds at a ceremony in London on Monday night, as ABC Arts reported.
The End of Everything is Harrison's thirteenth novel. It was published by Serpent's Tail, which he thanked in his acceptance speech.
"I really didn't expect to be up here this evening," he said. Of the win itself he said: "I feel like a proper writer at last, totally lacking in confidence."
The judging panel was chaired by the classicist Mary Beard, alongside the poet Raymond Antrobus, the musician Jarvis Cocker, the editor and critic Rebecca Liu and the author Patricia Lockwood. Harrison himself was a Booker judge in 2022.
The book was chosen from 163 submissions. The shortlist of six also included 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 and John of John by Douglas Stuart.
Beard described the novel as "the politics of now seen through the lens of the future". On its subject she said: "One main point of the book is that if, or when, such an apocalypse comes it will be incomprehensible."
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, called Harrison "the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world". Harrison was brisk about the category question: "The concept of genres as pigeonholes is over."
Of the book's outlook he was equally brisk. "It's a grim world and it will keep on being grim," he said.
It is worth pausing on what the panel has established. The prize goes to the book the judges consider the best, and the judges have said that the event at the centre of this one would, should it occur, be impossible to understand.
That places the novel beyond assessment in a way no other shortlisted title managed. A book about a comprehensible apocalypse could in principle be checked against the apocalypse. This one cannot, because the only witnesses in a position to check it would be unable to follow what they were checking.
The judgement is therefore permanent. Literary prizes are ordinarily vulnerable to reappraisal: tastes move, events overtake a thesis, and a novel that looks prophetic in November looks merely confident by March. The End of Everything is insulated against all three. If the invasion never comes, nothing contradicts it. If it comes, nobody present will be able to say so.
Harrison's own view that genre pigeonholes are over removes the last objection. Once a book need not be sorted into fiction or forecast, the panel is no longer rewarding an imagined end of everything; it is rewarding the only available account of one that can never be marked wrong.
The Department of Unnecessary Research, having read the judges' remarks closely, finds a single difficulty outstanding. A grim world that will keep on being grim is unfalsifiable in precisely the same way, and on Monday evening it won fifty thousand pounds.