M. John Harrison | Signed First Editions

About M. John Harrison

M. John Harrison has been admired by other writers for so long that it is easy to forget how long the wider literary world took to catch up. Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, in 1945, he sold his first story in 1965 and joined the staff of New Worlds in 1969, the magazine closely associated with the British New Wave in science fiction. He edited its books pages for almost a decade, at a time when the boundaries of the genre were being pushed in all directions. Harrison took away a lasting conviction: science fiction could be as ambitious, as beautifully written and as uncompromising as any other kind of literature.

His first novel, The Pastel City (1971), introduced Viriconium, a decaying city beneath an exhausted sun, and began a sequence of books and stories that he continued to develop until 1984. Viriconium is not the sort of fantasy world that invites the reader to settle in comfortably. Its splendour is fading, its history uncertain, and its atmosphere often more important than any straightforward account of events. The later books, particularly In Viriconium, which was nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize, have a peculiar, wintry beauty. The sequence remains an important landmark for writers interested in taking fantasy somewhere less familiar.

In the mid-1970s Harrison moved to the Peak District and became a serious rock climber. This was no passing enthusiasm. It led eventually to Climbers (1989), a novel of obsession, ambition and miserable weather that became the first work of fiction to win the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountain literature. He also ghostwrote the autobiography of British climbing great Ron Fawcett. Harrison has never been particularly easy to pin down, and his interests have tended to find their way into the writing rather than remain separate from it.

His reputation widened considerably with the publication of Light in 2002, the first volume of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. It won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Nova Swing, the second book, won the Clarke Award in 2007, and Empty Space brought the sequence to a close in 2012. These are unsettling, densely imagined novels, full of strange technology and unstable realities, but Harrison is never simply interested in the machinery of science fiction. His real subject is often the uncertain business of being human. In 2020, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, an elusive and mordantly funny novel set in a country coming quietly apart, won the Goldsmiths Prize. His short fiction is equally worth exploring, particularly the collection You Should Come With Me Now (2017). He has also spent years reviewing books for the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.

Harrison’s admirers include some of the most interesting writers working today. Neil Gaiman, Olivia Laing and Robert Macfarlane have all praised his prose, and his influence reaches well beyond science fiction. In 2022 he was invited to join the Booker Prize judging panel, another indication that the old divisions between literary and genre fiction have become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Now the Booker Prize has brought him to a much larger audience as a novelist in his own right. The End of Everything (2026), a short, eerie and darkly comic novel set on a crumbling English coast after an unexplained crisis, made both the longlist and shortlist for the 2026 prize. It is his first appearance there. At eighty-one, he would become the oldest winner in the prize’s history, surpassing Margaret Atwood, who was seventy-nine when she won in 2019.

Whatever the result, the attention is deserved. Harrison has spent much of his career as a writer’s writer, admired by those who understand just how difficult it is to make prose this distinctive. The readership is growing, and his books are finally receiving some of the attention they have long merited.

For collectors, the early editions are an appealing proposition. The Viriconium books established his reputation, while Light and its sequels brought him to a wider readership. Harrison’s career has taken an unusual route from cult science fiction to serious literary recognition, and the earlier books offer a record of that journey. They are also, quite simply, remarkable pieces of writing.