Samantha Harvey wins Booker Prize 2024 for novel ‘Orbital’: NPR

Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital. “I’m not what you’d probably call a space geek by any means,” she told NPR in 2023. But ever since childhood, she’s been fascinated by the astronaut experience.

Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images

hide caption

change caption

Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images

Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her science fiction novel Orbital. The novel follows six astronauts as they orbit Earth for one day of their nine-month space mission.

The Booker Prize is considered to be the most prestigious literary award for English fiction published in Great Britain and Ireland. Past winners include Margaret Atwood, who won twice for her novels The wills and The blind assassin, and Paul Lynch, who won the 2023 Booker Prize for his book The Prophet’s Song.

Orbital beating five other finalists on the Booker shortlist: Held by Anne Michaels, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, The storage by Yael van der Wouden, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood and James by Percival Everett.

Harvey’s astronauts—who come from the United States, Russia, Italy, Great Britain, and Japan—see 16 sunrises and sunsets in the novel’s 24-hour span. In 2023, Harvey told NPR’s Ari Shapiro that watching Earth’s orbit via videos from the ISS helped inspire the book: “I was so overwhelmed by the extraordinary beauty and strangeness of our planet,” she said.

Harvey wanted orbital, “more than anything else, to be a book about beauty and about joy and about … the thrill of looking at something so beautiful that also happens to be our home.”

Orbital also won the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature and was nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.