Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for Orbital, which PW’s review called a “gorgeous meditation” that “leaves readers feeling as if they’re floating in the same ‘dark unswimmable sea’ ” as its protagonists, six crew members on a space station, “as they orbit Earth over the course of a nine-month mission.”
The book, which also won the 2024 Hawthornden Prize for Literature, is the fourth by the English novelist Harvey, who was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness. The only British writer on the Booker Prize 2024 shortlist, which included books by both Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner, Harvey is the first woman to win the prize since Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood in 2019.
Orbital is the second of Harvey’s titles to be published by Grove Press, the imprint of Grove Atlantic, in the U.S, where it received an initial paperback print run of 20,000 copies following its hardcover publication last December. A spokesperson for Grove told PW that the press went back to print for another 20K after the book was shortlisted, and following the win ordered another 50,000 copies, “with more on the horizon.”
“Samantha Harvey’s compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendor from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness, and mission fatigue,” the Booker Prize judges wrote in their citation. “Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.”
In an interview published by the Booker Prizes following the announcement of this year’s longlists, Harvey said that, with the book, “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. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.”
This article has been updated with further information.
