News

See the November 2024 issue of Bookpage here.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey has received the 2024 Booker Prize.

Harvey’s novel follows “the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue,” a statement from The Booker Prize Judges reads. he novel captures the astronauts’ complexities through the lens of a single day.

“Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts — from America, Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below,” a press release from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, reads.

Orbital is also the winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize for Literature, a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

From Bath, United Kingdom, Harvey is the author of five novels — Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song and The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize — and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize. She teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.

The Pound Ridge Land Conservancy and the Pound Ridge Conservation Board present “The Magic of Pound Ridge Trees” Watch the video presentation here.

See the PowerPoint slides here.

Read the latest Booklist issue here.

Literacy icon and Star Trek star LeVar Burton was awarded the National Humanities Medal at the White House this week for his work fighting illiteracy.

Burton, executive producer of “The Right to Read” documentary and famed host of PBS’s “Reading Rainbow,” has helped shine a spotlight on the deepening literacy crisis facing the country.

Congratulations LeVar! Keep up the great work!