We Speak Authors

At 81, M. John Harrison Becomes the Oldest Booker Prize Winner in History

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

M. John Harrison at the Virtual Futures Salon. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Sixty years into a writing career that never sat still for a single genre, M. John Harrison has collected the biggest prize in English-language fiction, and made history doing it.

Harrison, 81, was named the winner of the 2026 Booker Prize on Monday night at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London, taking home £50,000 (about $67,000) for his dystopian satire The End of Everything. At 81, he becomes the oldest author ever to win the prize, passing Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she shared the award in 2019. Remarkably, this was Harrison’s first Booker nomination.

The winning novel follows Phillip Tennent, a beachcomber living on a near-future Kent coast, and his pistol-toting aunt Marnie as they navigate daily life in the shadow of an unexplained catastrophe, sifting through the artefacts the sea washes up. At 198 pages, it was the shortest book on the six-title shortlist, and it is Harrison’s 13th novel. It is published in the United Kingdom by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books, which claimed its first Booker win, and in the United States by Riverhead.

The judging panel, chaired by classicist and broadcaster Mary Beard and including writers Raymond Antrobus and Patricia Lockwood, critic Rebecca Liu and musician Jarvis Cocker, read 163 submitted books before reaching its decision. Announcing the result, Beard said: “The Booker judges spent a whole day debating the six remarkable novels on this year’s shortlist, before agreeing unanimously to award the 2026 prize to The End of Everything by M. John Harrison.”

Harrison beat a strong field that included two previous winners, Marlon James, shortlisted for The Disappearers, and Douglas Stuart, shortlisted for John of John. His victory is also being celebrated as a breakthrough for speculative fiction: Harrison, long regarded as one of science fiction’s most literary stylists, is the first winner the Booker Foundation itself describes as coming from the bona fide science-fiction world.

For an author who has spent six decades quietly reshaping what fiction can do, the night belonged, at last, to him.

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We Speak Authors

Cathy Park Hong Crosses Into Fiction: Her Debut Novel “Furies” Sparks a Worldwide Deal

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

We Speak Media

Cathy Park Hong. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Cathy Park Hong rewrote the rules for the memoir with Minor Feelings. Now she is coming for the novel.

Publishers Marketplace reported on November 3 that Hong will make her fiction debut with Furies, in a deal that places the book with One World in North America and Hutchinson Heinemann in the United Kingdom, with further editions set for France (Phébus), Hungary (Agave Könyvek), Germany (DTV) and Italy (INN Editore), a worldwide launch for a first novel.

Furies follows a failed Korean American journalist who returns home to write about her mother. From that intimate starting point, the novel opens outward into a story of mothers and daughters that also sweeps in North Korean terrorists, abducted actresses, filmmakers and a film-obsessed dictator, exploring the borders between history, imagination, fact and memory.

Hong, a poet before she was anything else, published Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning in 2020 to enormous acclaim. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and it permanently changed the conversation about Asian American life in the United States with its blend of memoir, history and cultural criticism.

That track record is what makes Furies one of the most anticipated literary debuts on the horizon. Writers who can move between poetry, essay and now fiction with equal force are rare, and publishers on four continents have bet that Hong is one of them. The multi-country deal, struck before the book has even reached readers, signals the level of expectation building around it.

No publication date has been announced yet. When Furies arrives, it will carry the weight of a simple, exciting fact: one of the sharpest literary voices of her generation has a whole new form to work in.