Key Facts

Eminent British novelist M. John Harrison won the prestigious 2026 Booker Prize for fiction for his visionary novel 'The End of Everything', published by Gollancz. The judges praised the novel as a masterwork of speculative fiction that explores ecological grief, planetary resilience, and the fragility of human memory in a fracturing world. Harrison's win marks a watershed moment in the prize's history, as 'The End of Everything' becomes the first work categorized primarily within science fiction and speculative literature to win the coveted £50,000 literary award.

GK Context

The Booker Prize, inaugurated in 1969 as the Booker-McConnell Prize, is awarded annually to the best sustained work of fiction written in the English language and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Indian and Indian-origin authors have historically distinguished themselves in the competition, including V.S. Naipaul (In a Free State, 1971), Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children, 1981), Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997), Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss, 2006), and Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger, 2008).