British writer, Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her book, Orbital and would be rewarded with £50, 000 cash prize.
Ms. Harvey was the only British author in the 2024 shortlist and also the first woman to win the prestigious prize in the last five years.
Orbital is a fictional depiction of the experiences of six astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), the biggest machine ever built by humans. The book recounts the experiences of the astronauts as they experience 16 sunrises and sunsets in one day from the ISS.
Announcing Orbital as the winner, the Chair of the judges and author, Edmund de Waal said emphatically that “Orbital is our book!”
The Chair announced that Orbital was “unanimously” chosen as the winner after a “proper day” considering the six-strong shortlist. Edmund de Waal said that “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.”
Speaking to the UK Guardian newspaper, Harvey said that she at a point nearly gave up on the book. She thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.”
According to her, Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was “very nice about it”. He “wanted to know where I’d got my intel.”
Alongside De Waal on this year’s judging panel were novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, and musician Nitin Sawhney.
De Waal said of the judges: “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, “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.”
Harvey had previously been longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness. She has also authored, All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind. She has also written a memoir on insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, which was published in 2020. Orbital is her first novel.
The 2024 Shortlist with Harvey and Everett were Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake, Anne Michaels for Held, Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep and Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional.