M John Harrison on winning the Booker at 81: I’m awake most of the night thinking, ‘This is extraordinary’

M John Harrison, Mike to his friends, apologises if he’s been talking “gobbledegook”. It’s the day after he won the Booker Prize for The End of Everything, his unsettling postapocalyptic “vibe” of a novel, and he’s only had about three hours’ sleep. “I woke up very suddenly thinking, ‘I won the Booker, I won the Booker,’ and that was it.”The veteran English author looked (and was) astonished to win on the night and is “still in shock” as he speaks, agreeably and gobbledegook-free. He had aspired to be longlisted for his 13th novel and thought a shortlisting was “within the bounds of possibility”, but that was as far as it went.“Statistically, if nothing else, you don’t win the Booker Prize. There are so many authors, there are so many books and it’s such a process of sieving and filtering that you don’t expect to be there. But I’m just totally delighted, and I was awake most of the night thinking, ‘This is extraordinary.’”It’s a significant victory for several reasons, probably the least of which is that Harrison (81) has overtaken Margaret Atwood to become the oldest winner. Does this have any special meaning for him?READ MORE“You know, not really. I mean, I’m proud of it, obviously, and it’s a unique selling point, or it will be until somebody older comes along. That’s the thing about holding a record, isn’t it? Eventually, somebody will take it away. Otherwise, I think, well, I don’t feel 81 anyway a lot of the time. I might as well be a 50-year-old.”More interesting is the science fiction of it all. While past Booker authors have “borrowed facets of science fiction in their work”, Harrison is the first winner “to have emerged from the bona fide SF world”, according to Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation. This isn’t quite the same as saying The End of Everything is science fiction, and Harrison doesn’t think it is.Categorisation “kind of limits fiction”, he says, and he wouldn’t expect science-fiction readers to respond favourably to his novel. “I would imagine that most of them will hate it, because it doesn’t produce a solution. It doesn’t give explanations. It deliberately avoids rationale, and science fiction is about explanation, rationale and closure.”Mary Beard, chair of the judges, suggested the book leaves readers with a “twinge of optimism”. Harrison doesn’t go that far, but he did originally conceive “a much grimmer ending” in his notebook, before realising that it wouldn’t fly. “I feel as if it’s not exactly hope [at the end]. That would be too positive a statement to make about it, but there is a kind of positiveness that I would only describe as spiritual, and I don’t know why. It’s no good asking me, because I can’t tell you,” he says, laughing. “The book is in itself a vibe.”On the Kent shoreline of the near future, we’re introduced to Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber who finds a morphing “artefact”. This is one of many such “biological gadgets” dumped in the sea by the iGhetti, the mysterious shape-shifting entities whose arrival decades before has prompted mass confusion and vague societal collapse. Phillip’s aunt Marnie, a 70-year-old artist and brutally tough survivor, doesn’t want the artefact in her house.M John Harrison (third from left) alongside the members of the judging panel for the 2026 Booker Prize. Photo: Maja Smiejkowska/Press Association This set-up, however, barely touches on the satire, horror or deliberately opaque weirdness that lies within this concise yet dense novel, which also features warps in reality known as “bad patches”, a “mad scientist” character who experiments on his living parents and close to 10 theories, by Harrison’s estimation, about who or what the iGhetti are, and why they have come. We are amusingly told, for instance, that they are associated “with dark matter or with the banking crisis of the late 2000s” and are a form of “astral jelly” that became “more determined and more successful” at the turn of the 1980s, later appearing as “tall writhing bursts of light” above London’s Square Mile.As this hints, Harrison first started conceiving what became The End of Everything during the global financial crisis of 2008, turning his rage into notes. But his original narrative was “too easy”, too much like science fiction, he says, so he put it in a drawer for two years, hoping it would fall into shape. When that didn’t happen, he started to cannibalise it for short stories. “I wrote a short story referring back to the crash, and this remotivated my rage.”Readers will also detect Brexit influences in Harrison’s vision, in which continental Europe has been bewilderingly “misplaced”, while the artefact, which evolves from a pudding-like lump to a limbed body capable of mimicking humans, bears the hallmarks of AI.“You kind of can’t avoid the zeitgeist. Whatever you’re writing and whatever you think you’re writing, you are affected by the basic kind of background theme of your age, of the times. And that will seep into your novel, whatever you do, whether you like it or not, in one form or another. It might be highly metaphorical, but it will be there,” he says.“Many people have said to me, and I kind of agree with them, that we live in this book’s time. Although it’s a difficult book and a book that begs to be reread, it somehow encapsulates the times, and that’s all you ever want to do, really, as a writer.”Brilliantly meshed into The End of Everything’s apocalyptic imagery – roadblocks, crashed airliners, threatening hinterlands lit by half-functioning neon – are the seaside atmospherics of the southeast coast of England, which he presents as a maudlin but still operational world of art galleries, fish and chip shops, gull cries and shingle beaches with dusty salt winds.Harrison began plotting The End of Everything around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, though the story drifted well away from its earliest forms. Photo: Maja Smiejkowska/Press Association Harrison, who lives in Shropshire with his partner, writer and editor Cath Phillips, has friends who live down on the coast and when he visits them he takes notes about “the eeriness” of the landscape and its visible economic fluctuations.“It’s littered, as is most of Britain, with previous industrial projects, notably fisheries. It was a big fishing place. And even now, the shingles are covered in rusty machinery for hauling boats out of the water, and you look at it and think, ‘My God, this is awful’. This is the scariest landscape I’ve ever seen.”When he’s there, he’s also conscious of two types of gentrification: tourism and the gallery-laden “art towns” of Kent. “Everything is made nice for you to go and look at art. I thought, ‘Well, I will have some fun with that,’ so I did.”He’s now working on new “bits and pieces” that may or may not coalesce into a novel. In a strange and disorienting age, do authors like him, who strive to be off-kilter, have to push their writing further in the direction of the odd and baffling? “Yes, you do,” he says. “You need to push it to the edge, but not quite so it falls over.”Michael John Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945. His father, an engineer, died when he was 13. The young Harrison was a reader, using his local libraries to broaden his spectrum while also delving into “a very large cupboard” of pulp fiction in one of the bedrooms at home. “It was full of popular fiction dating back to the 20s and 30s, which I just absorbed as if it was like a drink, really.”He started writing stories as a teenager, and in his early 20s he became an editor of the science fiction magazine New Worlds. His first novel, The Committed Men, was published in 1971. A former rock climber and fell runner, his other novels include Climbers, a 1989 book about rock climbing, and Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction in 2007. Before this year, he hadn’t attracted a sniff of Booker Prize interest, but more attention had come his way after his 12th novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, won the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize for innovation in fiction.As a past Booker judge – he served on the 2022 panel, which gave the prize to Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – he knows how books that withstand rereading are often the strongest contenders, as the shortlist will be read three times.“Certainly, I personally followed that course. I’ve always preferred a book that required some input on your part, as the reader, and which rewarded repeated readings.”This year’s judges made their unanimous decision after a whole day of debating, which intrigues him, as in 2022, thanks to “a very crude traffic light system”, they knew the likely winner from the start. “I would like to have been a fly on the wall this year,” he says, drolly noting that the panel – which also included Jarvis Cocker, Patricia Lockwood, Raymond Antrobus and Rebecca Liu – are all still alive. “They haven’t killed one another, which I think is a plus.”He doesn’t think a novel like The End of Everything could have won such mainstream acclaim earlier in his career because definitions of what makes good literature have shifted so much. “What used to be thought of as genre fiction is now being absorbed into and made a part of literary fiction. That wouldn’t have been possible even 20 years ago, I think.”So, although he was not expecting to be the beneficiary, he is not surprised that a book like his has won the £50,000 (€60,000) Booker Prize now. “I’ve seen my audience change over the last 10 to 15 years. I’ve seen a rise in readers who you would not expect to be reading a book with aliens in it. I’ve seen a rise in people who like difficult books and who want a book that reflects the zeitgeist,” he says.“And I’m glad. I’d be very happy to see that spread. Not just repeated, but spread out into the literary culture. It’s time, really.”