Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize
British novelist Samantha Harvey’s science fiction novel Orbital, about six astronauts who orbit the Earth for one day of their nine-month space mission, has beaten five other finalists on the Booker shortlist — Held by Anne Michaels, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood and James by Percival Everett — to win the 2024 Booker Prize.
The astronauts, who hail from the US, Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan, see 16 sunrises and sunsets in the 24-hour time span of the novel. Author Harvey said she wanted Orbital, “more than anything, to be a book about beauty, and about joy, and about … the rapture of looking at something so beautiful that also happens to be our home”.
Orbital also won the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
At a mere 136 pages long, Orbital is the second-shortest novel to win the award and the first to be set in space, the Booker Prize Foundation said.
“I was not expecting that,” Harvey said upon learning of her win, the first by a woman since Margaret Atwood was recognised for The Testaments alongside Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, in 2019, adding that she was “overwhelmed”.
A record five women were in the running for the ￡50,000 (US$63,700) prize, which was announced at a ceremony in London.
In her acceptance speech, the 49-year-old Harvey dedicated the prize to “everybody who does speak for and not against the Earth; for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life; and all the humans who speak for and call for and work for peace”.
Orbital is Harvey’s fifth novel, finally winning 15 years after her debut novel, The Wilderness, was longlisted for the Booker.
The Booker Prize, long considered the most prestigious literary award for English fiction published in the UK and Ireland, has seen previous winners such as Margaret Atwood, who won twice for her novels The Testaments and The Blind Assassin, and Marlon James, the first Jamaican to win the Booker in 2015, for his A Brief History of Seven Killings, an extraordinary imagining of the backstory to the attempted assassination of reggae legend Bob Marley.
