Eighty-one-year-old British writer, M. John Harrison, on Monday emerged the oldest winner of the  Booker Prize for fiction, for his book  “The End of Everything.”

Mr Harrison overtook Margaret Atwood, who was 79-years-old, when she won the prize in 2019 for “The Testaments”.

Mr Harrison won the award at a ceremony in London, ahead of five other shortlisted finalists, which included two former winners: Marlon James, the bookmakers’ favourite, for “The Disappearers,” and Douglas Stuart for “John of John”; Elizabeth Strout’s “The Things We Never Say,” Luke Kennard’s “Black Bag,” and Rebecca Perry’s debut “May We Feed the King.”

Each shortlisted author received £2,500.

The prize celebrates the best work of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the last year.

The 198-page novel, which was the shortest book on the shortlist, is the first work of science fiction to clinch the prestigious £50,000 pound ($67,000) literary award.

The postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast echoes concerns about artificial intelligence in a darkly satirical depiction of post-apocalyptic Britain.

The book which is Mr Harrison’s 13th novel, follows the beachcomber Phillip Tennent and his dementia-stricken, free-spirited aunt Marnie, set in the near-future on the windswept English coast invaded by mysterious objects known as the iGhetti.

An unnamed catastrophe plunges the characters into a murky post-apocalyptic world where the European continent seems to have disappeared and the arrival of the iGhetti, which can imitate humans, evoke interactions with artificial intelligence.

Mr Harrison, a veteran of the British science fiction literary scene, said the recognition of his work by Booker, by being shortlisted and even winning it, after six decades as an author, shows that the era of “genres as fences and boxes, pigeonholes, is over.”

Speaking about his book, Mr Harrison said, “Current affairs provided the themes and the satire. What happens when all of our expectations and explanations of the world become an ongoing disaster, but we still have to make a life?”

Mr Harrison told reporters after the award, “I think this book shows, and the prize now shows, that it is very possible to write a book that mixes not just two genres, but three or four.”

The chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, Gaby Wood, stated that many previous winners dabbled in science fiction, but Mr Harrison was “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide SF world”

Mrs Wood called it “a historic win, for a writer whose decades of work are lightly worn on every page.”

The Chair of the judges, Mary Beard, said at a press conference that Mr Harrison winning the award was a unanimous decision, reached after a full day of discussion.

She added, “The End of Everything” was “ahead in terms of both its extraordinary expert writing, but also huge ambition.

“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.

“One main point of the book is that if, or when, such an apocalypse comes it will be incomprehensible. And the old rules won’t matter either … This is the politics of now seen through the lens of the future.”

Other members of the judging panel included Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker; authors Patricia Lockwood and Raymond Antrobus; including Guardian journalist Rebecca Liu. 

Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, in 1945, Mr Harrison science fiction books included the Viriconium saga (1971-1984) and “Light” (2002), the first volume of a trilogy known as The Kefahuchi Tract.