Orbital by Samantha Harvey wins the Booker Prize 2024

Orbital by Samantha Harvey is tonight, Tuesday, 12 November, named the winner of the Booker Prize 2024. Harvey receives £50,000 and a trophy, which was presented to her by Paul Lynch, last year’s winner, at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London. The event was hosted by Samira Ahmed and broadcast live as a special episode of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. It was also livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ YouTube, Instagram and TikTok channels, with additional red-carpet coverage from the event hosted by actor and comedian Jessica Knappett, featuring interviews with special guests. Watch here.

The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction. The prize is open to authors from anywhere in the world, writing in English, and published in the UK and/or Ireland. It has rewarded and celebrated world-class talent for over fifty years, shaping the canon of 20th and 21st century literature. 

Orbital, which is Harvey’s fifth novel and sixth book, takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. 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. This compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour, whilst reflecting on the individual and collective value of every human life. 

‘In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world. Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. We wanted everything.

‘Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen 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. 

‘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.’ 

Edmund de Waal described the way the judges ‘talked together about why we read, how we read’, and said that ‘in our affectionate year of challenge have discovered the privilege of shared reading’. 

He was joined on this year’s judging panel by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney. They chose the winning title from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 and submitted to the prize by publishers.

British author Harvey was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness. The prize was last won by a British author when Douglas Stuart won in 2020 for Shuggie Bain. She is the first woman to win the prize since 2019, when it was jointly awarded to Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood for The Testaments. Harvey is the 21st woman to win since the prize’s inception in 1969. The 2024 shortlist featured the largest number of women in the Booker Prize’s 55-year history, with five women and one man represented. 

At just 136 pages long, Orbital was the shortest book on the shortlist and is four pages longer than the shortest-ever Booker winner – Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which won the 1979 prize. Taking place over just 24 hours, it also has the briefest timeframe of the shortlisted books. 

From a popular shortlist well received by critics, booksellers and readers, in the UK, Orbital has been the biggest-selling book. In the ten months between its publication in November 2023 and its Booker Prize shortlisting in September this year, it had sold 3,500 copies, according to Nielsen Bookscan data. It has now sold 29,000 copies, 2,000 of which were sold in the last week alone. Orbital has sold more copies in total than the last three Booker Prize winners combined had sold before they won. It was the bookmaker William Hill’s joint favourite to win the Booker Prize 2024, alongside James by Percival Everett. 

Orbital’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, has published eight previous Booker Prize winners, more than any other publisher: The Conservationist (1974), Saville (1976), Midnight’s Children (1981), Hotel du Lac (1984), The Famished Road (1991), Amsterdam (1998), The Gathering  (2007) and The Sense of an Ending (2011).

Wendy Smith of the Boston Globe wrote of the beauty of the writing in Orbital: ‘Harvey’s meditative novel portraying life aboard a spacecraft contains on almost every page sentences so gorgeous that you want to put down the book in awe…the sense of wonder and delight conveyed by Harvey’s elegant prose and philosophical musings makes this a deeply pleasurable book for serious fiction lovers.’ 

James Wood, wrote in The New Yorker: ‘Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel Orbital, which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare.’

In iNews Susie Mesure remarked that the poetry of Harvey’s prose contains an urgent message on the future of our planet: ‘Harvey blends prose of poetic beauty (“over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning – a slender molten breach of light”) with a clarion call to take responsibility for where we live. “Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?”’

Whilst Anthony Cummins wrote in the Observer about the joy, as a reader, of inhabiting life on the International Space Station alongside Harvey’s astronauts: ‘The attraction, line after riveting line, is her capacity simply to imagine her way persuasively into every part of life on the ISS, in all its nuts-and-bolts littleness as well as all its soaring majesty. The book seems to make its own time – a sealed craft of its own for the reader.’

Alice O’Keefe wrote in the Bookseller about Harvey’s shortlisting: ‘as a long-term admirer of Samantha Harvey, one of our most original and ambitious writers, I’m thrilled that she’s finally getting the big-prize shortlist recognition she has long deserved.’ 

The keynote speech was delivered by Baroness Lola Young of Hornsey, actor, campaigner, cross-bench peer and Chair of the Man Booker Prize 2017 judging panel. Baroness Young spoke of the vital role that books have played in her life, and gave a rousing call to action to support the children and young people caught in a care system in crisis: ‘My story, of a life where your character is defined by people who barely know you, still resonates with today’s care-experienced young people. We are currently faced with the urgent task of supporting almost 100,000 vulnerable children and young adults in care. 

‘Today, I pay tribute to all the writers, artists, teachers, lecturers, librarians, and friends who knowingly or otherwise helped me to develop the life skills I needed to survive back then. We all want children and young people to achieve more than just survival though, don’t we? 

‘Becoming confident with the written word shouldn’t be a solitary, clandestine activity, or a pleasure restricted to the privileged. However we reframe our thinking on the best way to support care-experienced children, however we help them realise that they matter, my feeling is that the journey will start with a book…’

Young’s memoir Eight Weeks will be published in hardback on 28 November by Penguin Random House’s Fig Tree imprint. 

The Booker Prize trophy, presented to Harvey, was originally designed by the beloved children’s author and illustrator Jan Pieńkowski in 1969, and was reinstated in 2022. In 2023 it was named Iris in a public vote, in honour of Iris Murdoch, who won the Booker Prize in 1978. 

Each of the shortlisted authors for the Booker Prize 2024 receives £2,500 and a unique, hand-bound edition of their book designed by six Fellows of the Designer Bookbinders society, which were on display at the ceremony. Find out more about the bound books here.

Harvey and shortlisted authors Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner, Anne Michaels, Yael van der Wouden and Charlotte Wood were all in attendance at the ceremony. 

Films directed by writer, director and producer Sebastian Thiel and starring actors Adelayo Adedayo, Nonso Anozie, Chipo Chung, Jason Isaacs, Will Poulter and Tanya Reynolds reading extracts of each of the shortlisted books were also screened. Longer versions of the videos, which have been viewed more than 48 million times, can be found on the Booker Prizes website and YouTube channel. The films were produced by Sharon Horgan and Clelia Mountford’s production company, Merman Television.

Publisher synopsis

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

Author biography

Samantha Harvey is the author of the novels The Wilderness, All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. Her work has been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women’s Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. She is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

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