British author Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize award with her novel Orbital, the first book set in space to win the prize.
Orbital contemplates the world from a different viewpoint as it follows a team of astronauts in the International Space Station.
It’s the biggest-selling book on the shortlist in the UK, and has also outsold the past three Booker winners combined, up to the eve of their success.
Harvey, the first woman to win the award since 2019, was announced as winner at a ceremony in London’s Old Billingsgate, and will take home £50,000.
Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, described Orbital as a “book about a wounded world”.
He said the judges all recognised its “beauty and ambition” and praised her “language of lyricism”.
Writing it, Harvey said she “thought of it as a space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space”.
The 136-page long story, which is Harvey’s fifth novel, takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts.
During those 24 hours they observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over their silent blue planet, spinning past continents and cycling past seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans.
It is the second-shortest book to win the prize, and covers the briefest timeframe of any book on the shortlist. The shortest winning novel in the history of the prize was 1979’s Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, at 132 pages.
