Britain’s Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel ‘Orbital’, a story about a single day aboard the International Space Station which she wrote during Covid-19 lockdowns, media reports said.
Samantha Harvey is the first woman to win the award since 2019.
Harvey, the first woman to win the award since 2019, was announced as winner at a ceremony in London’s Old Billingsgate and will take home £50,000, according to BBC.
It’s the biggest-selling book on the shortlist in the UK and has also outsold the past three Booker winners combined, up to the eve of their success.
She dedicated the prize to “all the people who speak for and not against the Earth and work for and not against peace”.
She said she questioned herself while writing the book: “Why would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space when people have actually been there?”
“I lost my nerve with it, and I thought I didn’t have the authority to write it.”
Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, described Orbital as a “book about a wounded world”.
He said the judges all recognised its “beauty and ambition” and praised her “language of lyricism”.
Writing it, Harvey said she “thought of it as a space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space”.
The 136-page long story, which is Harvey’s fifth novel, takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts.
During those 24 hours they observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over their silent blue planet, spinning past continents and cycling past seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans.
It is the second-shortest book to win the prize, and covers the briefest timeframe of any book on the shortlist. The shortest winning novel in the history of the prize was 1979’s Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, at 132 pages.
