British author M. John Harrison won the 2026 Booker Prize for 'The End of Everything,' announced at a ceremony at London's Old Billingsgate, a former fish market. The 198-page novel — the slimmest of six shortlisted books — carries a £50,000 ($67,000) prize.

Harrison, 81, becomes the oldest author ever honored, beating Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when jointly recognized in 2019. Judging panel chair Mary Beard told ABC News the panel met for four or five hours and the choice was ultimately unanimous.

According to the Booker Prize Foundation's chief executive Gaby Wood, Harrison is the first Booker winner to have 'emerged from the bona fide SF world,' though past winners like 2024's 'Orbital' borrowed from science fiction.

Harrison spent decades arguing for exactly this, telling ABC News he had worked 'for 40 to 50 years to shift the balance' between sci-fi and literary fiction.

His career includes the 'Virconium' series begun in 1971 and 'Nova Swing,' which NPR reports won both the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick awards.

The novel is set in the coastal town of Dalston-on-Sea in the not-too-distant future, amid the slow-burning occupation of shape-shifting entities called the iGhetti, told largely through beach scavenger Phillip Tennent, who recovers a biological 'artifact' discarded by the invaders.

The ambiguity has led many critics, per CNN, to read it as an allegory for AI — yet Harrison told BBC radio the spark was the 2008 financial crisis. Beard called it, per ABC News, 'the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.'

The win upset the betting market: ABC News reports former winners Marlon James ('The Disappearers') and Douglas Stuart ('John of John') had been the oddsmakers' favorites, alongside finalist Elizabeth Strout. Selected from 163 submissions, Harrison beat them with a career-first nomination.

Beard insisted the prize was 'not a lifetime achievement award' — 'We thought this was a book that had earned it,' she said. Wood noted the Foundation has dropped 'literary fiction' from its materials because 'all fiction is literary,' a signal the genre divide is loosening.

Accepting the award, Harrison was characteristically wry: 'I feel like a proper writer at last, totally lacking in confidence,' he said, per CNN.

He told ABC News reporters the era of 'genres as fences and boxes, pigeonholes, is over,' and that the validation 'gives you permission to be what you are, without a label stuck on your forehead.' As for the prize money?

He told reporters he would 'probably spend it on repairs to the house. Because being an author means your house is falling down all the time.'