Orbital by Samantha Harvey has this evening 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 with Prophet Song. Harvey’s novel takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station.

Soulfully beautiful, this majestic novella explores the magic, meaning and fragility of life as six astronauts orbit the earth, commented our reviewer Joanne Owen on reading the title. Profound and poetic, stark and stirring, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital sees six astronauts ponder the world and the meaning of everything as they embark on a nine-month scientific mission of “weightless drifting…nine months of this sardine living, nine months of this earth-ward gaping”. 

The earth seen from the astronauts’ perspective is a magnificent, powerful entity. A place of “auroras, hurricanes, storms”. Their strange, remarkable situation sees them experience a “day of five continents and of autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wildernesses and warzones.” Looking down, they understand why our planet is called Mother Earth, made all the more pertinent when the mother of one of the astronauts dies. 

Their distance from earth only makes them feel more connected to it, and to life. What is real, what is imagined? How are we connected to others? In the case of the astronauts, “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together and so alone, that even their thoughts, their mythologies, at times convene.”

Profoundly human, and smoothly philosophical, Orbital is a book to savour in one sweet, soulful sitting. It’s a poignant, long-lingering triumph.

Edmund de Waal, Chair of Judges commented: "Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened." 

British author Samantha Harvey, one of five women on a history-making shortlist, is the first woman to win since 2019.

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.

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.

Author Harvey commented: "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. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself."

And she certainly delivered. Bravo.

To see the full shortlist, check out our feature here.

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