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.
