Science fiction author M John Harrison becomes the first Booker Prize winner from the genre

M John Harrison, 81, has won the Booker Prize for The End of Everything, becoming the oldest winner in the award's history. Set on the Kent coast a few decades from now, the novel follows Phillip Tennent and his ageing aunt Marnie as they try to survive years after a disaster nobody can properly explain. Alongside them, vast, shape-changing beings called the iGhetti loom as an unexplained threat, their origins and intentions never revealed.

According to the report, the win marks a rare moment of mainstream recognition for a writer long admired by his peers but kept at the margins of literary fiction. Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that while plenty of previous winners had dabbled in science fiction, Harrison was the first Booker winner to emerge from the bona fide SF world. Harrison has been publishing for six decades; he sold his first story in 1965 and spent much of the 1970s running the books pages of the speculative fiction magazine New Worlds.

Mary Beard, chair of the judges, said the decision was unanimous after a full day of discussion. She described the book as one that turns you upside down and leaves you with a twinge of optimism despite its subject matter. Beard said one main point of the novel is that if such an apocalypse comes, it will be incomprehensible and the old rules will not matter, calling it the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.

In the article, Harrison is quoted describing the book as a disaster story in which the disaster is the failure to comprehend, with aliens arriving as incomers from another dimension, paralleling the gentrification of places like the UK's south-east coast. The prize gives unusual attention to a writer who has long been respected by fellow authors but rarely celebrated by the mainstream. Even admirers concede the book is not an easy read; at 198 pages, it was the shortest title on the shortlist.