Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her science fiction novel "Orbital." The novel follows six astronauts as they orbit the Earth for one day of their nine-month space mission.
The Booker Prize is considered the most prestigious literary award for English fiction published in the UK and Ireland. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, who won twice for her novels "The Testaments" and "The Blind Assassin," and Paul Lynch, who won the 2023 Booker Prize for his book "Prophet Song."
"Orbital" beat five other finalists on the Booker shortlist: "Held" by Anne Michaels, "Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner, "The Safekeep" by Yael van der Wouden, "Stone Yard Devotional" by Charlotte Wood and "James" by Percival Everett.
Harvey's astronauts – who hail from the U.S., Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan – see 16 sunrises and sunsets in the 24-hour time span of the novel. In 2023, Harvey told NPR's Ari Shapiro that watching Earth orbits 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, to be a book about beauty, and about joy, and about … the rapture of looking at something so beautiful that also happens to be our home."
"Orbital" also won the Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
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