British author M. John Harrison, who has amassed a cult following for his genre-bending novels, told AFP on Tuesday, after winning the Booker Prize, that the Western world is “becoming a weirder place”. Harrison won the literary award on Monday for his post-apocalyptic novel “The End of Everything”, opening the doors for mainstream critical and commercial success for the author who has until now been mainly popular within science fiction circles.”Publishing common sense tells you that you’re so unlikely to win the Booker.
And then when I heard my name, I was really startled,” Harrison said. At 81, he is the oldest winner of the prize. He is also, according to some critics, the first winning author from the world of science fiction, although he rejects the genre boundary and transgresses it in his works. Part of the reason for his win, Harrison admitted, could be that readers are ready for “weirder” fiction that speaks to the present.”The world is becoming a weirder place.
Certainly… the remains of the West is becoming a weirder place,” said Harrison, pausing to reflect.”We have to deal with a collapse of reliable information, which in a way this book is about.”- ‘One disaster after another’ -The book plunges the reader into the same disorienting, murky world its characters find themselves in after an unnamed catastrophe hits Britain.
The tight, 198-page novel gives away little information about the nature of the disaster or alien-like creatures known as iGhetti that arrive in this near-future world.”I have no idea where they came from, along with the reader, no idea whatsoever, or what they are,” said Harrison, finding his own creations similarly inscrutable. He wanted to deliberately keep the origin and purpose of the creatures unknown, insisting that if the Earth is overcome by disaster, we may not be able to make sense of it.
Those threats could be posed by climate change, artificial intelligence, or, as Harrison quips the economics imposed by “late-stage capitalism”. He was moved to write the book after the 2008 financial crisis, which exploded the global economy and devastated millions of ordinary households, and links the iGhetti to the City of London, the British capital’s financial heart.”I placed them in the City of London precisely to get that linkage,” said Harrison.
Nearly two decades on, as countries still deal with the ripple effects of the financial crisis combined with other conflicts, Harrison says he wanted to write a book where catastrophe isn’t “bound” or neatly packaged like other disaster novels.”I thought to myself, well, you know, what if this wasn’t the case? What if disasters are unbounded? And what if there’s no solution?””History has possibly always been like that… it’s just one ongoing disaster after another,” said Harrison.- ‘Possibility’ -But the book is also about how humans carry on living amid, or after, disaster, with the characters still having parties and socialising.
The book is “definitely based on the idea of people trying to carry on as if nothing has happened,” said Harrison. “The title is highly ironic, because it obviously isn’t ‘the end of everything’.”Despite his bleak diagnosis of the world, Harrison said while he was writing the book over nearly a decade, he felt a “sense of possibility”.”I intended it to be a very much more depressing ending, but when I got there I realised that the text itself had sort of changed my mind … I felt, as I wrote, a growing sense of positiveness.”The octogenarian had another unexpected encounter with possibility when he was announced the winner of the Booker, and its £50,000 award, at a London ceremony on Monday, after mainstream success evaded him for decades.
On three hours of sleep and still buzzing with excitement, Harrison has started to accept his new reality.”I’m fascinated because I’ve been writing like this for 50 years, solely out of a desire to break down boundaries between genres,” he said the day after his win. “I think, yeah, the world was ready for it.”
Tue, 10 Nov 2026 18:12:53 GMT