Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital.
Harvey’s novel, published in the U.S. last December by Grove, tells the story of one day in the lives of a group of astronauts aboard a space station. A reviewer for Kirkus called the book, which was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, “elegiac and elliptical” and “a sobering read.”
Harvey is the first woman to win the Booker Prize since 2019, when the award was given to two authors, Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.
Edmund de Waal, the chair of the prize’s judging panel, said, “With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.…Our unanimity about Orbital recognizes its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.”
Harvey was announced as the Booker Prize winner at a London ceremony. Upon hearing her name announced, she reacted with shock, holding her face in her hands for several seconds before taking the stage.
“I was not expecting that,” she said. “We were told that we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes my speech. It was just one swear word 150 times.”
The Booker Prize, given annually to “the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the U.K. and Ireland,” was established in 1969. Previous winners include Iris Murdoch for The Sea, the Sea, Kazuo Ishiguro for The Remains of the Day, and Paul Lynch for Prophet Song.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
