Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for fiction for her novel Orbital, a sharp, lyrical meditation on the state of the Earth and humanity as viewed from space, described by the judges as “beautiful and miraculous”.
Set on board the International Space Station the novel tracks a day in the life of four astronauts — from the US, the UK, Italy and Japan — and two Russian cosmonauts as they orbit the Earth, observing and reflecting on the vast dramas of daily life playing out on the “patient planet” below as well as their own personal concerns as they go about their work.
Edmund de Waal, chair of judges, said: “Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of 16 sunrises and 16 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.”
He also singled out the book’s distinctive style. “With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.”
Harvey, who was previously longlisted for the Booker Prize, has described Orbital, her fifth novel, as a “domestic novel set in space”. She told the Booker Prize website: “I wanted to write about our human occupation of low Earth orbit for the last quarter of a century — not as sci-fi but as realism.”
The novel was well received by critics when it was published last October with many singling out the distinctive quality of the prose. The Financial Times review said Harvey’s book raised “a clarion call without being preachy”, adding that in contrast to “the bleak apocalyptic tone of much contemporary climate fiction, Orbital’s luminous descriptions remind us of the beauty at stake when humanity plays fast and loose with our single, and singular, blue marble”.
The novel almost never made it to print as Harvey abandoned her early attempts, citing the fact that she had “never been in space”, before picking it up again during the lockdown.
De Waal said that the decision to award the prize, which was announced on Tuesday evening at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in the City of London, was unanimous. The judges ultimately chose Orbital from an overall tally of 156 submitted novels.
Orbital has already proven hugely popular with book buyers — more copies (29,000) had been sold before the announcement than the previous three Booker winners combined at the same stage, according to the prize organisers — and was the bookmakers joint favourite for this year along with James by Percival Everett, the one male author on the shortlist. At 136 pages it is the second-shortest book to win the Booker Prize.
This year’s shortlist — which also included works by Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake), Anne Michaels (Held), Yael van der Wouden (The Safekeep) and Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional) — was united by a common theme of writers trying to make sense of an increasingly fractured world. However, de Waal said that Orbital was not a “programmatic book”.
Harvey is the first British author to win the Booker, which is open to any book originally written in English, since Douglas Stuart in 2020 for Shuggie Bain, and the first woman to win the prize since 2019 when Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood were joint winners. Last year the prize was awarded to the Irish novelist Paul Lynch for Prophet Song.