Orbital by Samantha Harvey is tonight, Tuesday, 12 November, named the winner of the Booker Prize 2024. Harvey receives £50,000 and a trophy, which was presented to her by Paul Lynch, last year’s winner, at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London. The event was hosted by Samira Ahmed and broadcast live as a special episode of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. It was also livestreamed on the Booker Prizes’ YouTube, Instagram and TikTok channels, with additional red-carpet coverage from the event hosted by actor and comedian Jessica Knappett, featuring interviews with special guests. Watch here.
The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for a single work of fiction. The prize is open to authors from anywhere in the world, writing in English, and published in the UK and/or Ireland. It has rewarded and celebrated world-class talent for over fifty years, shaping the canon of 20th and 21st century literature.
Orbital, which is Harvey’s fifth novel and sixth book, takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. During those 24 hours they observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over their silent blue planet, spinning past continents and cycling past seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. This compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour, whilst reflecting on the individual and collective value of every human life.
Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 judges, says:
‘In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world. Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. We wanted everything.
‘Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.
‘All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.’
Edmund de Waal described the way the judges ‘talked together about why we read, how we read’, and said that ‘in our affectionate year of challenge have discovered the privilege of shared reading’.
He was joined on this year’s judging panel by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney. They chose the winning title from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024 and submitted to the prize by publishers.