Orbital by Samantha Harvey has been named the winner of the Booker Prize 2024. The winner was announced by Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London.
Harvey receives £50,000 and a trophy, which was presented to her by Paul Lynch, winner of the Booker Prize 2023.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Six astronauts rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?
Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents, and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it.
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Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, describes the winner as ‘a book about a wounded world’, adding that the panel’s ‘unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition’
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British author Samantha Harvey, one of five women on a history-making shortlist, is the first woman to win since 2019
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Orbital has been 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
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It is the first Booker Prize-winning book set in space
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At just 136 pages long, it is the second-shortest book to win the prize and covers the briefest timeframe of any book on the shortlist, taking place over just 24 hours
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Harvey said of writing Orbital: ‘I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHORSamantha Harvey lives in the UK and is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University
Winner of the Booker Prize 2024 for Orbital. She has been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for The Wilderness in 2009 and shortlisted for Orbital in 2024.
Harvey is also the author of the novels All is Song,Dear Thief and The Western Wind, and a work of non-fiction, 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.
