Samantha Harvey’s dazzling novel “Orbital” has won the 2024 Booker Prize for Fiction in a stunning victory. Last year’s winner, Paul Lynch, presented the prestigious trophy to Harvey at a gala ceremony in London on Tuesday evening.
After receiving advice not to swear, an elated Harvey told the audience in her acceptance speech, “I was not expecting that.” We received instructions prohibiting us from using profanity during our speech. So there goes my speech.”
Harvey’s win marks a significant moment, as she becomes the first female author to claim the Booker since 2019, when Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” and Bernardine Evaristo’s “Girl, Woman, Other” made history by sharing the award.
At just 136 pages, “Orbital” is also the second-shortest novel to ever win the Booker, which has been awarded annually since 1969 to the best work of fiction written in English and published in Britain or Ireland.
The novel follows a diverse cast of astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station, chronicling their daily lives and observations as they witness 16 sunrises and sunsets each day and watch weather patterns unfold across the fragile borders of the Earth below.
In her acceptance speech, Harvey described the experience of looking at the Earth from the vantage point of space as “a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself.”
“We are star stuff—pondering stars,” Harvey said, invoking the words of renowned astronomer Carl Sagan. “We are also earth stuff, pondering the earth. And I think my novel is an exercise in that pondering. Looking at the earth from space is a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in it is herself. What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.”
Edmund de Waal, the artist and writer who chaired this year’s panel of Booker judges, praised “Orbital” as a “beautiful, miraculous novel” that transforms our world, making it “strange and new” for readers.
“Harvey makes our world strange and new for us,” de Waal said, adding that the author’s writing has a way of rendering the Earth “something for contemplation, something deeply resonant.”
In the days leading up to the announcement, Percival Everett’s “James”—a retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the enslaved Jim—had been the bookmakers’ favorite to win. Everett’s novel recently secured the Kirkus Prize for fiction and is also a finalist for this year’s National Book Award.
Other finalists for the 2024 Booker Prize included Rachel Kushner for “Creation Lake,” Anne Michaels for “Held,” Yael van der Wouden for “The Safekeep,” and Charlotte Wood for “Stone Yard Devotional.” Samantha Harvey has now received two shortlists for the Booker Prize, following the longlisting of her debut novel “The Wilderness” in 2009.
In closing her acceptance speech, Harvey dedicated the prize “to everybody who does speak for and not against the earth; for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life; and all the humans who speak for and call for and work for peace.” With the Booker’s global influence, Harvey’s triumph is sure to propel “Orbital” to new literary heights, cementing her status as one of the most vital voices in contemporary fiction.