‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize

Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her science fiction novel Orbital. The novel follows six astronauts as they orbit the Earth for one day of their nine-month space mission.

The Booker Prize is considered the most prestigious literary award for English fiction published in the UK and Ireland. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, who won twice for her novels The Testaments and The Blind Assassin, and Paul Lynch, who won the 2023 Booker Prize for his book Prophet Song.

Orbital beat 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.

Harvey’s astronauts – who hail from the U.S., Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan – see 16 sunrises and sunsets in the 24-hour time span of the novel. In 2023, Harvey told NPR’s Ari Shapiro that watching Earth orbits via videos from the ISS helped inspire the book: “I was so overwhelmed by the extraordinary beauty and strangeness of our planet,” she said.

Harvey 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.