Booker Prize 2026 winner M John Harrison coined the term New Weird for fiction mixing science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. His winning novel, The End of Everything, features many traits of this genre. Asked if his win was a victory for the New Weird, Harrison replied, "to a degree."
Booker Prize 2026 winner M John Harrison named the 'New Weird' genre. What is the genre, how does it differ from Lovecraft, and where to start reading
M John Harrison, who won the 2026 Booker Prize, famously coined the term New Weird for speculative fiction that mixes science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror.
His Booker-winning novel, The End of Everything, is set in post-apocalyptic Britain, where a beachcomber scavenges the coast for artefacts left by alien-like entities called the iGhetti, and it encompasses many characteristics of what is known as the New Weird.
New Weird fiction is typically set in decaying, often urban worlds, teaming with fantastical creatures, futuristic science and messy politics. Asked whether his win was a victory for the New Weird, Harrison replied, "to a degree."
How the New Weird differs from traditional fantasy
Traditional fantasy typically features heroes who triumph so readers can imagine they lived happily ever after, but the New Weird turns this trope on its head. Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2009), edited by literary scholar Robin Anne Reid, describes the New Weird as fiction that subverts the clichés of the fantastic "in order to put them to discomfiting, rather than consoling ends."
Not all scholars agree that New Weird deserves its own genre. Literary scholars Marco Caracciolo and Gry Ulstein, in an essay on the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, call it "a hybrid literary mode" -- a way of writing rather than a fixed category. Others have dismissed the label as a marketing gimmick. Even China Miéville, one of the movement's most prominent writers, described the New Weird as "like most literary categories... a moment".
Where does the word 'weird' come from?
It comes from the Old English wyrd, meaning fate or destiny, but as a literary category, weird fiction is usually traced to the American pulp magazine Weird Tales (1923-1954) and to the horror writer H P Lovecraft.
In his 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft described the weird tale as a literature of "cosmic fear."
How is the New Weird different from the old?
Where the old writers recoiled from mutation and contamination of the human with the non-human, the new ones treat them with curiosity and compassion.
In her 2025 book New Weird Fiction and the Anthropocene (Palgrave Macmillan), Trang Dang of Nottingham Trent University writes that the New Weird has "challenged and rejected" Lovecraft's racism, prejudice and misogyny.
How did Harrison coin the term?
The term first appeared in print in 2002, in Harrison's introduction to Miéville's novella The Tain.
It gained currency on April 29, 2003, when Harrison started a thread on the message board of the British magazine The 3rd Alternative, asking whether the New Weird existed and, if so, who wrote it. Soon afterwards, Miéville published his own manifesto in the same magazine, stressing the genre-blending.
Who are the key writers of the movement?
China Miéville's Perdido Street Station (2000) is widely seen as the book that brought the New Weird into the mainstream.
Jeff VanderMeer, whom The New Yorker has called "the King of Weird Fiction", is the movement's other leading figure. Annihilation (2014), the first book of his Southern Reach trilogy, follows four unnamed women (a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist and a surveyor) on the 12th expedition into Area X, a pristine wilderness monitored by a secret government agency.
What do these books deal with?
Despite their monsters, these books are largely about the real world and explore themes of how power manifests, class struggles, ecological crises, the Anthropocene, and even the constraints of storytelling itself.
Why does Harrison's Booker win matter?
For most of its history, the Booker has rewarded literary fiction, while science fiction and fantasy have had their own prizes, most of which Harrison has incidentally won, including the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the Arthur C Clarke Award, and the Philip K Dick Award. Harrison's win brings mainstream recognition to the genre.