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    "headline": "M. John Harrison, 81, wins the 2026 Booker Prize for post-apocalyptic satire The End of Everything",
    "description": "M. John Harrison has won the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything, a satirical novel judges led by Mary Beard chose unanimously.",
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    "keywords": "Booker Prize, M. John Harrison, Mary Beard, The End of Everything",
    "articleBody": "M. John Harrison, an 81-year-old English writer who sold his first short story in the 1960s, has won the 2026 Booker Prize for The End of Everything, a satirical novel set on England’s south coast after a strange catastrophe. The Booker Prize Foundation announced the result on November 9, and the chair of judges, Mary Beard, said the panel reached its verdict without a split. Beard said the judges spent a whole day arguing over six shortlisted books “before agreeing unanimously to award the 2026 prize to The End of Everything by M. John Harrison.” It is his first Booker nomination. He had sat on the other side of the table before, as one of the judges for the 2022 prize. A blob of jelly that learns to talk The novel follows Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber who lives off whatever the Channel throws onto the shore, and his elderly aunt Marnie. Some years earlier an unexplained disaster, described in the book as an invasion of “iGhetti”, wrecked ordinary life. Government barely works, vigilantes keep order, and a crashed plane might be sitting in somebody’s back garden. Tennent’s latest find is a lump of jelly that keeps growing, starts to speak and soon begins giving orders to the humans looking after it. Beard summed up the effect in one line: “This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.” She also said the book “leaves you with a twinge of optimism”, which is not what most readers expect from a title like this one. The judges, in comments released at shortlist stage, pointed to its humor and its use of overheard dialogue, scraps of talk scavenged and reused the way Tennent reuses objects from the tideline. Why he wrote it Harrison told the Booker Prizes website that the art towns along England’s eastern coast, from Hastings up toward Suffolk, gave him his setting. The themes came from current events. “What happens when all of our expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but we still have to make a life?” he asked. In a radio interview he traced the first spark back to the 2008 financial crisis, saying he wanted to write about the failure of explanation. From pulp magazines to the Booker stage For American and Canadian readers who know Harrison mainly from science fiction shelves, this win closes a long loop. Here is how his career builds to this week: 1960s: First stories published; he joins the staff of the British magazine New Worlds and runs its books pages. 1971 to 1984: The Viriconium books, still cited as a landmark of strange, literary fantasy. 1989: Climbers wins the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain writing. 2007: Nova Swing takes the Arthur C. Clarke Award. 2020: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again wins the Goldsmiths Prize. 2026: The End of Everything, published in June by Serpent’s Tail, wins the Booker. That run stretches roughly six decades from first sale to Booker, a gap few winners can match. Reference records of the prize now list him as the oldest writer to take the award and the first author rooted in science fiction to do so. The prize is also a first for his publisher. Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books, had been nominated four times before, twice with Esi Edugyan and twice with Karen Joy Fowler, without a win. Book prizes have had a busy autumn. In France, the latest Goncourt winner made headlines of a different kind when Philippe Jaenada admitted hiding a ChatGPT sentence in his prize novel, and thriller fans recently heard Lee Child explain how his brother now writes the Jack Reacher books alone. More book and screen news sits on our Entertainment page. Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, on July 26, 1945. The actor Kathryn Hunter has already recorded a reading from the opening of the winning novel for the prize’s own channels. Further reading Wikipedia: M. John Harrison Image: Danie Ware, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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