The 81-year-old’s postapocalyptic novel The End of Everything takes home the £50,000 award
Emma Loffhagen
Monda 9 November 2026
Eighty-one-year-old M John Harrison has won the Booker prize for The End of Everything, a postapocalyptic novel set on a near-future Kent coast, becoming the oldest winner in the award’s history.
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| Actor Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. |
At 89, the star of the Graduate and Rain Man demonstrates both brilliance and a startling lack of self-awareness
The choice of title for an actor’s autobiography can be revealing. Sylvester Stallone went with The Steps, conflating life’s challenging progress with those steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that Rocky euphorically ran up. Michael Douglas cheerfully and unreflectively called his One Helluva Ride.
Guido Guidi reads and threads together the signs of the world. He collects and observes rather than claiming to “create.” He seldom speaks in the first person and, by conviction, steers clear of the personalism of “I”. He favors silence over speech, suggestion over symbol, the epigram over the manifesto, the quotation over the declaration. He delights in ambiguity, misreading, wordplay, and transgression, and, in his reserve, most often speaks through the words of others, “in quotation marks”. For all this—and indeed because of it—he is regarded as a master by several generations of artists.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: LE BAL Archive
In the meticulously staged photographs of Gregory Crewdson, everyday life is transformed into a quiet, cinematic enigma. Over the past three decades, the American photographer has developed a distinctive visual language that blurs the boundary between film and photography. His images are carefully constructed like movie scenes—complete with actors, elaborate sets, lighting crews, and detailed storyboards—yet they ultimately result in a single, silent frame. For Crewdson, photography is defined by its stillness: there is no narrative before or after the captured moment, only the unresolved mystery held within the image.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Templon Archive
Few photographers have probed the human condition with the curiosity and unsettling clarity of Diane Arbus. Throughout the 1960s, Arbus turned her camera toward people who existed both at the center and at the margins of society—individuals whose lives rarely appeared in the carefully polished imagery of postwar America.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fraenkel Gallery Archive
Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary artists. Her work explores how images create history, form memory, and determine who is seen and who remains invisible. Using her own biography as a starting point, she develops an oeuvre that goes far beyond the personal and investigates issues of identity, belon- ging, and representation. To this end, she employs documentary, staged, and con- ceptual strategies, developing a visual language that is equally poetic and political.
By Dimitris Lempesis
In a world saturated with vivid images, exaggerated colors, and carefully constructed visual narratives, the photography of Martin Parr remains remarkably relevant. The intense colors, close-up perspectives, and seemingly ordinary scenes that define his work have become familiar visual codes of contemporary culture, appearing daily in advertising, social media feeds, and travel photography. Yet decades before these aesthetics became widespread, Parr was already examining how people consume, perform, and represent their lives through images (Part I).
By Dimitris Lempesis
In a world saturated with vivid images, exaggerated colors, and carefully constructed visual narratives, the photography of Martin Parr remains remarkably relevant. The intense colors, close-up perspectives, and seemingly ordinary scenes that define his work have become familiar visual codes of contemporary culture, appearing daily in advertising, social media feeds, and travel photography. Yet decades before these aesthetics became widespread, Parr was already examining how people consume, perform, and represent their lives through images.
By Dimitris Lempesis
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| Roberto Gómez Bolaños |
Today’s Doodle celebrates the 91st birthday of the iconic Mexican comedian, entertainer, writer, composer, television director, and producer Chespirito, best known for creating and starring in some of the most beloved television series in Mexican history.
Luxury brands and social media algorithms, working hand in hand, are elevating intellectuals, creating book clubs and sponsoring literary and artistic prizes. Welcome to the internet’s most cerebral season yet
Emma Reyes (1919–2003) was a Colombian painter and writer whose work vividly captures themes of displacement, memory, and resilience. Unrecognized for much of her life, her fame surged posthumously with her haunting memoir, “The Book of Emma Reyes (Memoria por correspondencia)”. Her literary prose and visual art intimately expose the harsh realities of a poverty-stricken childhood in Bogotá, offering a powerful narrative of survival, identity, and artistic self-realization.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: White Cube Gallery Archive
Eiko Yamazawa (Japanese, 1899-1995)
(Untitled (Yasue Yamamoto as Okichi in “Elegy for a Woman” by Yuzo Yamamoto))
c. 1943-1944, printed 1944
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15 x 10.5cm (5 7/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
Mat: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.)
Frame (outer): 54.61 x 44.45cm (21 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.)
Tomoka Aya, The Third Gallery Aya
© Yamazawa Eiko
Eiko Yamazawa (山沢 栄子, Yamazawa Eiko, February 19, 1899 – July 16, 1995) was a renowned Japanese photographer. She is considered one of Japan’s earliest women photographers and is among the few women photographers in Japan who were active both before and after World War II. First trained in Nihonga, she later studied photography in the U.S. under the mentorship of Consuelo Kanaga, and also exposed to the work of Kanaga’s contemporaries such as Paul Strand and Edward Weston.
Rewriting the story of Japanese photography through the eyes of women and showcasing the work of 27 groundbreaking artists from the 1950s to today, the exhibition “Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now” highlights the perspectives that have shaped how Japan sees itself – and how it is seen by the world.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Photographers’ Gallery Archive
The American photographer Deborah Turbeville (1932–2013) challenged and reshaped both fashion photography and the ways of working with the photographic image in an artistic context. She belonged to no particular school or movement, yet from the 1970s onwards developed a deeply personal visual language – characterised by a distinctive aesthetic in which timelessness, melancholy, and a sense of patina permeate her photographs.By Dimitris Lempesis
