M. John Harrison and sci-fi genre win first Booker Prize for The End Of Everything

“I really didn’t expect to be up here this evening,” he said as he accepted the award at a ceremony in London on Monday night. “I honestly didn’t, here at the end of everything. You talk glibly about your life being changed, but it’s weird when it happens. I feel like a proper writer at last, totally lacking in confidence.”

Set a few decades from now, The End Of Everything follows Phillip Tennent, who lives with his aging aunt on the coast of Kent, England, after the iGhetti, a race of mysterious and extremely powerful lifeforms, destroyed the country. Tennent scrapes together a living by collecting iGhetti artifacts that wash ashore until he finds a creature that keeps changing and threatens to change everything again. “It’s a book that turns you upside down, raises a wry smile—and surprisingly, given the subject matter, leaves you with a twinge of optimism,” Beard continued. “One main point of the book is that if, or when, such an apocalypse comes, it will be incomprehensible. And the old rules won’t matter either[…]This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.”

Harrison has been publishing since the ’60s and has won an Arthur C. Clarke Award, a Philip K. Dick Award, and the 2020 Goldsmith Prize. Other judges on this year’s panel included Preistdaddy author Patricia Lockwood, critic Rebecca Liu, poet Raymond Antrobus, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.