# Samantha Harvey wins the Booker Prize for Orbital

British author Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel *Orbital*, becoming the first writer to take the award for a book set in space.

The prize was announced at a ceremony in London’s Old Billingsgate, where Harvey received the £50,000 award. Her novel follows six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station over a single day, a structure that gives the book its unusual viewpoint and compressed timeline.

At 136 pages, *Orbital* is one of the shortest winners in Booker history and covers the briefest timeframe of any book on this year’s shortlist. The novel takes readers through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets as the crew watches Earth pass beneath them, observing glaciers, deserts, mountains and oceans from orbit.

Harvey said she dedicated the prize to “all the people who speak for and not against the Earth and work for and not against peace,” and told BBC News she was in complete shock and overwhelmed by the result. She also said the win would change her life and joked that she planned to buy a new bike with part of the prize money.

The judges, led by Edmund de Waal, praised the book’s beauty and ambition and described it as a work about a wounded world. Harvey said she had thought of the novel as a kind of “space pastoral,” blending a planetary scale with the language of nature writing. She also said she had worried about whether she had the authority to write from such a setting while drafting the book during successive lockdowns.

The win is notable not only for the subject matter but also for the author’s place in the prize’s recent history. Harvey is the first woman to win the Booker Prize since Bernardine Evaristo shared it with Margaret Atwood in 2019. She had previously appeared on the Booker longlist in 2009 for her debut novel, *The Wilderness*.

This year’s shortlist was also unusual for the number of women on it, with five women among the six shortlisted authors, the largest female representation in the prize’s 55-year history. That context helped frame Harvey’s victory as part of a broader year for women writers at the prize.

The Booker Prize remains one of the highest-profile awards for fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. Harvey’s win places *Orbital* alongside a long list of major contemporary winners while also marking a first for the prize: a novel that turns the view from space into the center of the story.

Citations - BBC reported the prize announcement, Harvey’s reaction, the £50,000 award and the judges’ comments. - BBC also supplied the book’s plot, page count, Booker history context and shortlist composition.