British Author Samantha Harvey Awarded Booker Prize for ‘Orbital’

British author Samantha Harvey has been awarded the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel, Orbital. This marks the first time a book set in space has received the prestigious award. Orbital explores the world from an alternative perspective, focusing on a team of astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The novel was the biggest-selling book on the shortlist in the UK. It also outsold the combined total of the past three Booker winners, up to the point of their respective successes. Ms. Harvey is the first woman to claim the prize since Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood jointly won in 2019. Her victory was announced during a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London, and she is set to receive £50,000. She dedicated the prize to “all the people who speak for and not against the Earth and work for and not against peace.” Harvey also revealed her initial self-doubt during the writing process, stating: “Why would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space when people have actually been there?” She added, “I lost my nerve with it and I thought I didn’t have the authority to write it.” In an interview with BBC News, Harvey expressed that she was “in complete shock and very overwhelmed.” She further commented that the recognition would be life-changing. When questioned about her plans for the £50,000 prize money, she responded: “I need to buy myself a new bike, and it’s going to be a good bike.” Edmund de Waal, who chaired the judging panel, characterized Orbital as “a book about a wounded world.” He noted that the judges collectively acknowledged its “beauty and ambition” and commended her “language of lyricism.” Harvey herself stated that she “thought of it as a space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space” while composing the novel. This 136-page narrative, Harvey’s fifth novel, unfolds over a single day in the lives of six astronauts and cosmonauts. Within that 24-hour period, they witness 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets above their tranquil blue planet, observing continents as they rotate, seasons as they cycle, and features such as glaciers, deserts, mountain peaks, and ocean swells. Orbital stands as the second-shortest book ever to win the award and encompasses the most concise timeframe of any title on this year’s shortlist. The shortest novel to receive the prize in its history remains Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, published in 1979, which was 132 pages long. Harvey had previously informed BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme that she composed Orbital during consecutive periods of lockdown. She remarked: “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.” In 2009, Harvey’s debut novel, The Wilderness, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. This year’s six-book shortlist featured five women, marking the highest number of female authors in the prize’s 55-year history. The other nominees were: This esteemed award is presented to works of fiction penned in English by authors globally, provided they are published in either the UK or Ireland. Notable past recipients of the prize include Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Bernardine Evaristo, and Salman Rushdie. Copyright 2024 BBC. All rights reserved. The BBC disclaims responsibility for the content found on external websites. Information regarding its approach to external linking is available.