Samantha Harvey wins the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital
Orbital, a 136-page novel set aboard the International Space Station, won the £50,000 Booker Prize at a ceremony in London.
Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital, announced on 12 November 2024 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The prize is worth £50,000 and is open to novels written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.
Orbital follows six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station over a single day, in which they see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. At 136 pages it is the second-shortest book to win the prize, and the first winning novel set in space. The judges, chaired by the artist and writer Edmund de Waal, were reported to have reached a unanimous decision.
Harvey was the only British writer on the shortlist and the first woman to win since 2019. The other shortlisted books were James by Percival Everett, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, Held by Anne Michaels, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. Five of the six shortlisted authors were women.
The result is a reminder that the Booker does not reward length or scale for their own sake. A short, tightly controlled novel on an unfashionable subject can hold its own against larger books. For writers, the practical point is that a book should be as long as it needs to be; for readers, the winner is a novel that can be read in an evening and thought about for rather longer.
Sources: NPR: 'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize; Al Jazeera: British writer Samantha Harvey wins Booker Prize for space novel Orbital.