Author M John Harrison has become the oldest ever winner of the Booker Prize, picking up the prestigious literary award for his post-apocalyptic novel The End of Everything.
Harrison, 81, who has built a cult following over his 60-year career, was named the winner of the £50,000 prize at a ceremony in London on Monday. He has surpassed Margaret Atwood as the oldest ever Booker winner.
The End of Everything is set in the years after a mysterious catastrophe that caused British society as we know it to collapse. The story follows a man and his aunt who must muddle through on the south-east English coast in the aftermath of an unexplained disaster and the arrival of mysterious alien beings. The book has divided opinion among readers.
Dame Mary Beard, who chaired the Booker judges, said: "It's a challenging read, but some of the best fiction is challenging." She added: "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."
Harrison began writing in the 1960s and has published 13 novels, five short story collections and an "anti-memoir". While he dislikes labels like science fiction and fantasy, he has been called "the titan of literary science fiction". Booker Prize chief executive Gaby Wood said he is "the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world".
"He is a genuinely original thinker, a genre-defying writer who takes ideas seriously," Wood said. "Though very unsettling, The End of Everything is not in fact a strange book. It's a realist book about a strange world, populated by desperate, unmoored characters."
The author has said he deliberately omitted as much explanation about the background to the events as possible, in order to make readers feel the same disorientation as the characters.
Harrison's fellow nominees were Marlon James (The Disappearers), Luke Kennard (Black Bag), Rebecca Perry (May We Feed the King), Elizabeth Strout (The Things We Never Say) and Douglas Stuart (John of John).
In a statement, Dame Mary said the panel spent a whole day debating the six shortlisted novels before reaching a unanimous decision to name Harrison the winner. The other judges were Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, US novelist Patricia Lockwood, poet Raymond Antrobus, and journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu.
The Booker Prize is an annual award for the best novel written in the English language and published in the year up to 30 September. It was launched in 1969.
Source: BBC
