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The Booker Prize 2024 To Orbital By Samantha Harvey



©Alberto Pezzali/AP

The Booker Prize 2024 went into space for the first time! Well, not literally, but by annoucing yesterday evening at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London this year's winner - Orbital by Samantha Harvey.


Harvey received £50,000 and a trophy, which was presented to her by Paul Lynch, winner of the Booker Prize 2023. Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, described the winner as "a book about a wounded world", adding that the panel’s "unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition." 


Harvey’s novel takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts who rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?


At just 136 pages long, it is the second-shortest book to win the prize and covers the briefest timeframe of any book on the shortlist, taking place over just 24 hours. According to the author herself, "I thought of it as space pastoral - a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space."


Samantha Harvey is a British author and a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Her previous novel The Wilderness was also longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 and won the Betty Trask Prize. Her other works include novels All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind, and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping.


Samantha Harvey, one of five women on a history-making shortlist, is the first woman to win since 2019. Orbital has already been the biggest-selling book on the shortlist in the UK, and has sold more copies than the past three Booker Prize-winners combined had sold up to the eve of their success.


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