Orbitalby Samantha Harvey Wins 2024 Booker Prize

Mar. 15, 2025

Samantha Harvey and her book ‘Orbital’.Photo:Matt Lincoln; Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Matt Lincoln; Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

The book, which PEOPLEreviewed in the Nov. 4 print issueandthe New Yorkeralso called “the strangest and most magical of projects,” has already been widely recognized for its contemplative themes and eloquent writing. It came out in paperback in the U.S. on Oct. 29.

Harvey’s novel follows “the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue,” a statement from The Booker Prize Judges reads.

Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

The novel captures the astronauts' complexities through the lens of a single day.

“Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts — from America, Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below,” a press release from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, reads.

Orbitalis also the winner of the2024 Hawthornden Prize for Literature, afinalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fictionand was shortlisted for theUrsula K. Le Guin Prize.

The Booker Prize, bestowed on an novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland, is awarded yearly and comes with a cash prize of 50,000 pounds, or $64,000. According to theBooker Prize site, the prize winner “can expect a dramatic increase in book sales.”

TheBoston Globe’s Wendy Smithwrites, “Samantha Harvey’s meditative novel portraying life aboard a spacecraft contains on almost every page sentences so gorgeous that you want to put down the book in awe … A thrilling book, filled with marvel at the beauty of creation.”

Guardiansimply renders the novel “an Anthropocene book resistant to doom.”

Samantha Harvey, author of ‘Orbital’.Matt Lincoln

Matt Lincoln

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From Bath, United Kingdom, Harvey is the author of five novels —Orbital,The Western Wind,Dear Thief,All Is SongandThe Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize — and one work of nonfiction,The Shapeless Unease. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize. She teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.

source: people.com