Oldest Booker Prize winner ever is 81, and he has a message for late starters

M John Harrison, aged 81, is the oldest winner the Booker Prize has ever had. The prize is a major annual award for a novel written in English, and Harrison won the 2026 edition for The End of Everything.

Queen Camilla hosted a reception at Clarence House, her London home, to celebrate the 2026 prize and the first Children's Booker Prize, a new award for children's books. Hello magazine reported the exchange that took place there.

The End of Everything is set on the Kent coast in the near future. A mysterious invasion of shapeshifting creatures arrives as society begins to collapse. The Booker Prizes describes it as a dystopian satire that offers "the politics of now seen through the lens of the future", and calls Harrison a genre-defying British author.

Harrison told the Queen that the book took up to 15 years to write, with plenty of stops and starts along the way. He said the two of them had talked about how age is often treated as a limitation. In his view, his win meant you can start late.

The Queen, who was 79 at the reception, agreed. Her reply, as reported by Hello, was: "I couldn't agree more. We are definitely not finished!"

Harrison now holds the age record that Margaret Atwood set in 2019. Atwood was 79 when she won for The Testaments, and she was the oldest winner until this year.

For readers who want to see the wider prize, the Booker Prizes website lists the winners, the shortlisted books and the history of the award.