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At the 2024 Booker Prize ceremony held in London, British author Samantha Harvey was announced as the winner for her novel Orbital. This marks the first time a book set in space has won the prestigious award. Orbital takes the reader on a journey with a team of astronauts aboard the International Space Station, offering a unique perspective of the world. This novel has also been the UK’s biggest-selling book on the shortlist and has outsold the past three winners combined.
Harvey dedicated her £50,000 prize to “all the people who speak for and not against the earth and work for and not against peace.” She expressed doubts during the writing process, unsure if anyone would want to read about space from her viewpoint in Wiltshire. Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, praised the book’s beauty and ambition, describing it as “a book about a wounded world.” Harvey’s previous novel, The Wilderness, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009.
Orbital covers a single day in the lives of six astronauts and cosmonauts, observing 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. Its 136 pages make it the second-shortest book to win the Booker Prize. Harvey likened her writing to a space pastoral, reflecting on the beauty of space. She wrote the novel during successive lockdowns, finding resonance in the astronauts’ isolation within the tin can of the ISS.
The 2024 shortlist saw five women out of six nominees, the largest number of women represented in the Booker Prize’s 55-year history. The award is given to works of fiction written in English by authors worldwide and published in the UK or Ireland. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie, Bernardine Evaristo, Hilary Mantel, and Margaret Atwood
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