Samantha Harvey Wins 2024 Booker Prize For her Book Orbital

British author Samantha Harvey wins the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital, a powerful novel exploring human fragility and Earth’s precariousness from space.

on Nov 13, 2024

British author Samantha Harvey has made history as she becomes the first woman since 2019 to win the prestigious Booker Prize for her book Orbital. Her book Orbital, which is about astronauts looking down at Earth, has won prize money of worth £50,000 and a trophy at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London. Harvey is the 19th woman to win this award since its inception in 1969 compares to 36 make winners. Previously her debut novel The Wilderness was also lonlisted for the award category in 2009.

In her acceptance speech, Harvey reflected on the imperfections of the world and acknowledged the challenges she faced while writing Orbital, particularly questioning the value of her own perspective on space. She initially struggled with doubts about why anyone would want to read her imagined depiction of astronauts when people have actually experienced it firsthand.

In 2020, another British author, Douglas Stuart, was awarded this prestigious prize for the Shuggie Bain. This year, a record number of women were shortlisted for the award and five were nominated in total. On being asked if the one man on the list of contenders, Percival Everett, to win for his novel James which is a powerful retelling of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, he emphasised that “there was no question, that anyone could have won this, irrespective of their background, their gender, their ethnicity, whatever, absolutely anyone”.

Orbital, at just 136 pages, is the second-shortest novel ever to win the Booker, following Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which won in 1979. The novel spans a 24-hour period, following six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they complete 16 orbits around Earth. It explores themes of human fragility, grief, and the planet’s precariousness. De Waal praised the novel’s lyricism and the way Harvey’s writing makes the world feel “strange and new.”

This year's judging panel, which unanimously chose Orbital, included novelist Sara Collins, The Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, writer Yiyun Li, and musician Nitin Sawhney. The Booker Prize Foundation’s CEO, Gaby Wood, remarked on the novel’s timeliness, given its reflection on global crises and environmental issues. She noted that the novel’s themes resonate in what is likely to be the warmest year on record.

Harvey joins a distinguished list of previous winners, including Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, who both won in 2019. The previous year’s Booker Prize went to Irish author Paul Lynch for his dystopian novel Prophet Song. The 2024 shortlist included authors like Rachel Kushner, Anne Michaels, and Charlotte Wood, all of whom attended a reception with Queen Camilla earlier in the day.

Following the announcement, the royal family extended their congratulations to Harvey via social media, with Queen Camilla praising her “brilliant novel.”