Orbital by Samantha Harvey is the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize. The author received a cash award of £50,000 and the trophy “Iris”, which was presented to her by Paul Lynch, the previous year’s winner.
Harvey’s novel takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. The Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, described the novel as “a book about a wounded world” and that the jury – also comprising Sara Collins, Yiyun Li, Edmund de Waal, Nitin Sawhney and Justine Jordan – recognised its “beauty and ambition”.
Samantha Harvey was one of five women on the shortlist and is the first woman to win since 2019. Her novel Orbital has turned out to be the biggest-selling book on the shortlist in the UK, and has sold more copies than the past three Booker Prize-winners combined had sold up to the eve of their success.
It is the first Booker Prize-winning book set in space and at 136 pages long, it is the second-shortest book to win the prize. It covers the briefest timeframe of any book on the shortlist, taking place over just 24 hours.
Harvey said that she thought of Orbital “as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space.” She was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 for her debut novel The Wilderness, about an ageing architect who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. The book was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. Her previous novel, The Western Wind, was about a priest in 15th-century Somerset. In 2020 Harvey published her first book of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, about her experience of chronic insomnia. She is part of the faculty for the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and is the author of five novels.
A review of Orbital on Scroll said it “is a wondrous, evocative novel about witnessing humanity from space. […] To perceive the planet as both a jewel in space and a wasteland of human evolution stirs feelings of unease as one slowly – again – comes to terms that we are immaterial to the resolve of the winds that will uproot human settlements, tides that will swallow farmlands, tectonic plates that will part to engulf cities, and fires that will burn civilisations to ash. Harvey’s ability to oscillate between the magnificent and inconsequent, the grotesque and the beautiful, and the preventable and inevitable creates a supremely stylish novel where the evocative, wondrous prose encompasses within itself the grandness of human ambition and the smallness of our existence.”
