British author Samantha Harvey wins Booker Prize for 'beautiful' space tale

London: British author Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her “ambitious and beautiful” ‘Orbital’, which becomes the first novel set in space to win the GBP 50,000 literary prize selected from a historic shortlist that was dominated by women this year.

‘Orbital’, the biggest-selling book on the shortlist in the UK, takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station who observe 16 sunrises and sunsets on Earth spinning past continents and cycling past seasons.

It was named the winner at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in the City of London on Tuesday evening after the judges described it as a compact yet beautifully expansive novel which invites readers to observe Earth’s splendour whilst reflecting on the individual and collective value of every human life.

“I originally thought, 'Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it's like being in space when people have actually been there'," said Harvey, who dedicated her award to everybody who "speaks for and not against the Earth".

“I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space,” she said.

At just 136 pages long, the winning title is the second-shortest book to win the prize and covers the briefest time frame of any book on the shortlist, taking place over just 24 hours.

“Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity, Harvey makes our world strange and new for us,” said artist-author Edmund de Waal, chair of the 2024 Booker judges.

“All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about ‘Orbital’ recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share,” he said.

The judging panel included award-winning British Indian musician Nitin Sawhney, novelist Sara Collins, fiction editor of ‘The Guardian’ newspaper Justine Jordan and Chinese American writer and professor Yiyun Li.

The female-dominated shortlist this year included American author Rachel Kushner for the spy thriller ‘Creation Lake’, Canadian Anne Michaels for her familial tale ‘Held’, Australian Charlotte Wood for her philosophical ‘Stone Yard Devotional’ and Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch author to be shortlisted, for her debut novel ‘The Safekeep’.

American writer Percival Everett was the only male among this year’s finalists announced in London this week for his Mark Twain ode ‘James’. Each of the shortlisted authors will receive GBP 2,500 and a bespoke bound edition of their book.   As the winner, Harvey can expect instant international recognition, a dramatic increase in global sales and a career transformed overnight.

The Booker Prize 2023 was won by Paul Lynch with ‘Prophet Song’, which saw a 1,500 per cent increase in sales in the week after its win. In the year since, sales of the English-language edition of his book have increased by more than half a million copies, with sales across all formats now totalling more than 560,000 worldwide.  The Booker Prize trophy, presented to Harvey, was originally designed by children’s author and illustrator Jan Pieńkowski in 1969 and was reinstated in 2022. A life-sized replica of the trophy named Iris, after Booker winner Iris Murdoch, was displayed for the first time at the Booker Prize 2024 ceremony and will be moved to Waterstones bookstore at Piccadilly in central London.