Booker Prize-winning author M John Harrison said he thinks he may use his prize money to build a writing shed and make some home repairs.
Mr Harrison, 81, became the oldest winner of the coveted prize on Monday.
The accolade is for his dystopian novel, The End Of Everything, which is set on the Kent coast in the near-future and navigates the mysterious invasion of shapeshifting entities amid societal collapse.
Mr Harrison said he now had plans to use some of the £50,000 prize money to do some work on the home he shares with partner Cath Phillips.
“It might be a writing shed, I think repairs – Cath and I live in a very old townhouse,” he said.
He added “we might do something” with it at home.
Having been on the judging panel in 2022, Mr Harrison said he thought he might get on to this year’s longlist but described his win as “a surprising result”.
He was speaking at a reception at Clarence House, in central London, hosted by the Queen to celebrate the Booker Prize 2026 and the inaugural year of the Children’s Booker Prize.
Mr Harrison, who wrote his first novel in 1971, but had been writing for 10 years before then, told Camilla it had taken up to 15 years to write this prize-winning novel as there were “lots of stops and starts”.
Camilla said “and here you are, bingo” as she congratulated him on the win, saying “you have been writing for a long time”.
Speaking about achieving success at this point in his career, he told Camilla: “It is really exciting later on in life.”
Mr Harrison became the oldest winner in the history of the Booker Prize, surpassing The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, who was 79 when she received the prestigious literary award in 2019.
Authors of the shortlisted titles in this year’s awards were also among the reception guests.
Speaking about his chances of winning the award, Mr Harrison said: “(I thought) I might, for this book, get on the longlist – and that was what we could hope for, and that would be good.
“When I got the longlist, I thought, well, who knows? I might get a shortlist down on this.”
He described the warm wave of congratulations and events he had attended in the days since he was announced as the winner as “a series of high points”.
After speaking to Camilla, he said: “This is one of them. I mean, it’s great to be here, although I am very nervous obviously. You don’t see that.”
The Children’s Booker Prize has been set up to try and grow a new generation of readers by championing the best children’s fiction from writers around the world.
It is being billed as a celebration of the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12, written in or translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland.
It will see 30,000 copies of the shortlisted and winning books gifted to children.
The shortlist is set to be released on November 24, with the winner being announced at a ceremony at the Young V&A in London on February 2. Four children are to be included as part of the judging panel.
There is a prize pot of £2,500 for each shortlisted title and £50,000 for the winner, to match the Booker Prize.
The Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is open to authors from anywhere in the world as long as their book is originally written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
The other shortlisted titles and authors for this year’s prize were The Disappearers by Marlon James, Black Bag by Luke Kennard, May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout and John Of John by Douglas Stuart.
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