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British author Samantha Harvey won the £50,000 (about $63,750) 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, becoming the first woman to win the award since 2019, when Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo were joint winners. Harvey's novel was published in the U.S. in hardcover by Atlantic Monthly Press in 2023 and was just released in a paperback edition by Grove Press.
Orbital is the first Booker Prize-winning book set in space. At 136 pages, it is the second-shortest book to win the prize and covers the briefest time frame of any book on the shortlist, taking place over just 24 hours
Harvey said of writing her novel: "I thought of it as space pastoral--a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space."
Chair of the judges Edmund de Waal commented: "In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world. Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. We wanted everything.
"Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.... Our unanimity about Orbital recognizes its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey's extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share."
Gaby Wood, Booker Prize Foundation CEO, added: "Orbital wins the prize in a year of geopolitical crisis, likely to be the warmest year in recorded history. A book about a planet 'shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want,' about an 'unbounded place' with no wall or barrier visible from space, with all politics 'an assault on its gentleness,' it is hopeful, timely and timeless."
Harvey has been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for The Wilderness in 2009 and then for Orbital. She is also the author of the novels All Is Song, Dear Thief, and The Western Wind, as well as a work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. She has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women's Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize.