The Booker Prize 2024

‘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.’ 

‘I’ll be very sad to see this year’s judging panel go. One of them said she would hear the others’ voices in her head as she read from now on, and I will continue to feel the reverberations of this panel’s enlightened, empathetic act of collective reading too.  

‘From a fantastically strong shortlist, they have chosen as their winner a small, strange, beautiful and mighty book by Samantha Harvey, a writer last longlisted for the Booker 15 years ago, who has done nothing but cement and extend her brilliantly original gifts. 

‘Orbital wins the prize in a year of geopolitical crisis, likely to be the warmest year in recorded history. A book about a planet “shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want”, about an “unbounded place” with no wall or barrier visible from space, with all politics “an assault on its gentleness”, it is hopeful, timely and timeless.’  

Edmund de Waal (Chair) is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels and for his bestselling family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, which won the 2010 Costa Book Award for Biography and the 2011 Ondaatje Prize. It has been translated into over 30 languages and in 2016 was awarded Book of the Decade by the Independent Booksellers Association. De Waal was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction in 2015, the year he published The White Road. In 2021, when he published Letters to Camondo, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and awarded a CBE for his services to art. His art publications include texts by a number of Booker Prize authors, including the late A.S. Byatt, Colm Toíbín, Peter Carey and Elif Shafak.

Born in Nottingham, de Waal apprenticed with the renowned potter Geoffrey Whiting from 1981 to 1983, and went on to study English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 1986.

De Waal’s interventions have been made for diverse spaces and museums worldwide, including The British Museum and the V&A Museum in London; Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire; the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris; The Frick Collection, New York and Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

He has collaborated with a number of poets, performers, musicians and other visual artists, including the photographer Sally Mann and the choreographer Wayne McGregor. His library of exile, a pavilion originally exhibited within the Ateneo Veneto during the 2019 Venice Biennale, brought together two thousand books, most in translation, by exiled writers from Ovid’s time to the present day. The project travelled to Dresden, Germany and then to the British Museum. In 2021 the books were donated to the University of Mosul library in Iraq, which was destroyed in 2015.

Sara Collins is the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton, which won the Costa First Novel Award in 2019, became a Times bestseller, was translated into more than 15 languages and was broadcast as a four-part television drama on ITV in December 2022.   

Sara studied law at the London School of Economics before qualifying as a barrister in 1994. She worked as a lawyer for 17 years before obtaining a Master’s degree in creative writing with distinction from Cambridge University in 2016, where she was the recipient of the Michael Holroyd Prize.   

Sara is also a literary critic, screenwriter and broadcaster. She has been a frequent contributor and guest host on BBC Radio 4 and is a co-host of the Graham Norton Book Club Podcast on Audible. 

Justine Jordan has been Fiction Editor at the Guardian for two decades. She has commissioned reviews and interviewed writers including Raymond Briggs, Susanna Clarke, Jon McGregor, Sebastian Barry and China Mieville. 

She was born in London and grew up in Bristol. She studied English at Cambridge and Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin. She won the Vogue writing competition and then joined the Guardian website in its early days as night editor, going on to set up the books website.   

Her criticism has featured in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the London Review of Books. She is a member of the Writers’ Prize academy, and her previous judging experience includes the Guardian First Book Prize, the 4thWrite Short Story Prize and the Costa Novel Award.  

Yiyun Li is the author of 11 books, including Wednesday’s Child, The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End. Her novels and short stories have been translated into more than 20 languages. Li’s honours and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and others.   

Trained as a scientist, she is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a 2023 International Writer by the Royal Society of Literature. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Atlantic and Harper’s, among other publications. She is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing programme at the Lewis Center for the Arts. 

Nitin Sawhney is a world-class producer, songwriter, touring artist, club DJ, multi-instrumentalist and composer for theatre, dance, videogames and orchestras. He has recorded multiple albums and over 70 film and TV scores, which include adaptations of the 1981 Booker Prize winner Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and The Namesake by Booker-shortlisted novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, Human Planet, What’s Love Got To Do With It and a current project for Disney.     

The recipient of the Ivor Novello 2017 Lifetime Achievement award, he has collaborated with other world-class artists of all kinds. He has had his own BBC Radio 2 series and appeared on Desert Island Discs. He holds eight honorary doctorates from UK universities and sits on the boards of multiple charities, including Complicité. For the last four years he has been the Chair of the PRS Foundation, the UK’s funding body for new music and talent development, as well as being a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, the British Academy of Film & Television Arts and the Grammy Awards. 

A regular cultural and political commentator, he has written articles for all the major UK broadsheets and is due to release an anthology of his written work next year. His latest album, ‘IDENTITY’, for Warner Music, was released in October 2023. He was made CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours.  

The Booker Prize, first awarded in 1969, is the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades. The impact of the award is significant.

Last year’s winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, saw a 1500% increase in sales in the week following its win. Before its longlisting, the book’s publisher, Oneworld, had sold 4,000 copies in hardback. Over 100,000 hardback copies have now been sold in the UK. It reached number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list in the UK for hardback fiction. In Ireland, it stayed at number one across all books for several weeks after the win.

Internationally, Oneworld printed 170,000 export trade paperbacks, with exceptionally strong sales in Ireland, Australia and India; Grove Press has sold more than 90,000 hardbacks and eBooks in North America. Translation rights deals increased from two before Prophet Song’s longlisting to 13 before its win. A total of 33 deals have now been secured, with a number of publishers buying Lynch’s complete backlist too.