Orbital by Samantha Harvey has been named the winner of the Booker Prize 2024. As winner of the prize, she received £50,000. She was presented with their trophy by Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, who describes the winner as ‘a book about a wounded world’, adding that the panel’s ‘unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition’.
The ceremony 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.
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.
British author Samantha Harvey, one of five women on a history-making shortlist, is the first woman to win since 2019. Her novel, Orbital has been the biggest-selling book on the shortlist in the UK, and has sold more copies than the past three Booker Prize-winners combined had sold up to the eve of their success.
This year’s judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined 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.
Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 judges, said:
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.
Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, added:
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.
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