Queen Camilla is acknowledging that she and King Charles aren’t getting any younger.
On Thursday, November 12, the queen held a reception for the Booker Prize Foundation in London, where she met Booker Prize recipient M John Harrison. At 81, he’s the oldest writer to win the prestigious award.
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At the celebration, Harrison told Camilla, 79, that he’s been writing for over 60 years—and it took him around 15 years to write the Booker Prize-winning novel, The End of Everything.
“And here you are, bingo,” Camilla said, per Hello!, congratulating Harrison on his win. “You have been writing for a long time.”
Harrison told Camilla that being successful is “really exciting later in life,” and later reflected on their discussion about age.
Related: ‘Incredibly Frail’ Charles Gets Another Negative Health Update Amid Claims He ‘Looks Very Small’ & Is ‘Covered in Make-Up’
“We were talking about how age is automatically considered a limitation,” Harrison explained, “and we were saying the great thing about what has happened to me proves that you can start late, and we were laughing about that.”
Camilla responded, “I couldn’t agree more. We are definitely not finished!”
Her bold comments about age follow recent reports of Charles’ ongoing cancer battle. In an October 2026 YouTube video, royal writer Tom Sykes alleged that Charles looked “incredibly frail” during a recent outing.
“I’m not sensationalizing this. I’m not saying I think the king is about to drop down dead or anything like that,” Sykes began. “I have no reason to doubt my sources. But up close you can really, really see the toll that the treatment has taken on him.”
According to Sykes, Charles, 77, “looks very small” and has “lost a great deal of weight.” To make matters worse, the king has allegedly lost “a lot of hair, [and] a lot of flesh off his face.”
Sykes further claimed that Charles is “covered in make-up,” likely to conceal any visible signs of his illness.
“Absolutely covered in make-up, and when you’re up close you can see it. It looks totally fine on camera, I think it’s the right thing to do, I hasten to add… It would be distracting if Charles was looking terribly grey or this or that… All the conversation would be about his health,” Sykes added. “He just looks very, very, very old and very, very tired.”
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