Orbital by Samantha Harvey has won the Booker Prize 2024. The British author received £50,000 and a trophy presented to her by Paul Lynch, last year’s winner, at a ceremony in London on Tuesday evening.
Harvey’s fifth novel takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they contemplate Earth and reflect on life’s fragility and our interdependence. The novel was praised as “a book about a wounded world” and “small, strange, beautiful and mighty”.
Edmund de Waal, chair of the judges, said: “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.
“Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of 16 sunrises and 16 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.
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“All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.”
Reviewing Orbital in The Irish Times last December, Nathan Dunne called it “a sober meditation on climate catastrophe and existence ... It has the tenor of Terrence Malick’s late work, The Tree of Life, and To the Wonder, where a collage of imagery scuppers any need for plot ... Orbital is not only a timely meditation but an essential one. Her best novel to date”.
Harvey, a creative writing tutor, at Bath Spa University, said: “I wanted to write about our human occupation of low Earth orbit for the last quarter of a century – not as sci-fi but as realism ... I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space, with a slightly nostalgic sense of what’s disappearing.”
She described writing a novel set in space during successive lockdowns: “I would have footage of the Earth in low Earth orbit on my desktop all the time as I wrote. It was my main reference point. It felt such a beautiful liberation to be able to do that every day, and at the same time I was writing about six people trapped in a tin can. It felt like there was something resonant about that and our experience of lockdown, of not being able to escape each other and also not being able to get to other people.”
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the prize, said: “From a fantastically strong shortlist, they have chosen as their winner a small, strange, beautiful and mighty book by Samantha Harvey, a writer last longlisted for the Booker 15 years ago, who has done nothing but cement and extend her brilliantly original gifts.
“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 was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize. She is the first woman to win the prize since 2019, when it was jointly awarded to Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood for The Testaments. Harvey is the 21st woman to win since the prize’s inception in 1969. The 2024 shortlist featured the largest number of women in the Booker Prize’s 55-year history, with five women and one man represented.
At just 136 pages long, Orbital is the second shortest Booker winner, Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which won in 1979, has 132 pages. Orbital has been the biggest-selling book on the shortlist, selling 29,000 copies. It was the bookmaker William Hill’s joint favourite to win, alongside James by Percival Everett.
De Waal’s fellow judges were authors Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, the Guardian’s fiction editor Justine Jordan, and musician Nitin Sawhney. They chose the winning title from 156 books published between October 2023 and this September and submitted by publishers.
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