M. John Harrison wins the Booker Prize

A long-standing star of the British SFF scene, M. John Harrison, has won the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. His post-apocalyptic novel The End of Everything was not considered a likely winner, but beat out five other finalists to clinch the prize. At 81 years old, he is the oldest winner of the prize in its history and is the first winner to overtly come from the field of science fiction, though some previous authors had at least flirted with the genre, such as Margaret Atwood, Marlon James (who was nominated again this year) and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Harrison, born 1945 in Rugby, began publishing short fiction in the mid-1960s. He began working on New Worlds, the magazine at the forefront of the British "New Wave" movement in science fiction, first as a reviewer and then as books editor, working for Michael Moorcock. In the 1970s he began his seminal touchstone work, the Viriconium sequence, starting with The Pastel City. He would return to this sequence periodically in works like A Storm of Wings and In Viriconium, but disliked the idea of a fictional "canon" and once famously decried the notion of worldbuilding as "the great clomping foot of nerdism."

In 1973 he published The Centauri Device, an "anti-space opera" that was hugely influential on the British space opera novelists who followed, such as Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds. In 1989 he published his first major mainstream literary novel, Climbers, which invoked his own love of rock climbing as an activity. He would later write in both the SFF and literary spheres, though came to dislike the idea of genre categories.

Arguably his last major SF work was The Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy, consisting of Light (2002), Nova Swing (2006) and Empty Space: A Haunting (2012). 

The End of Everything, published in June this year, depicts the aftermath of a devastating event where the world has been impacted by the iGhetti, huge lifeforms of unknown origin and purpose. The protagonist makes a living by collecting and selling iGhetti artifacts, until something he finds one day has huge consequences for himself and his family.

The judging panel, including editor Rebecca Liu, Pulp frontman and lyricist Jarvis Cocker, US novelist Patricia Lockwood, poet Raymond Antrobus and chairwoman, historian Dame Mary Beard, awarded the prize to the book unanimously after a day of debating the shortlist.