Samantha Harvey Wins This Year’s Booker Prize
The Booker Prize is regarded as Britain’s most important literary prize. This year, it was awarded to a Penguin Random House UK author: Samantha Harvey received the £50,000 prize on Tuesday evening in London for her novel “Orbital,” which is published by Jonathan Cape and Vintage UK.
On Tuesday evening in London, British author Samantha Harvey was awarded the renowned Booker Prize for her novel “Orbital.” The Booker Prize, worth £50,000 (about €60,000), is one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the English-speaking world, making it one of the most important literary awards. “Orbital” is published by Penguin Random House imprints Jonathan Cape and Vintage UK. The British publishing group had three titles on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. Samantha Harvey is the first woman to receive the award since 2019, when it was split between Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, also authors published by Penguin Random House.
Edmund de Waal, Chair of the Booker Prize judging panel, describes the winner as “a book about a wounded world,” adding that the panel’s “unanimity about ‘Orbital’ recognizes its beauty and ambition.” Taking place over 24 hours, the novel follows a team of astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments, and test the limits of the human body. Yet, their primary task is observation. Circling Earth sixteen times a day, they witness the planet’s breathtaking beauty, from glaciers and deserts to the peaks of mountains and swells of oceans. Despite their distance from Earth, they cannot escape its pull, feeling deeply connected and protective of it. Harvey’s novel explores profound questions about life, humanity, and our planet.
‘The beauty of space’
The author herself describes her work as “a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space,” referring to it as space pastoral. Born in Kent in 1975, Samantha Harvey studied philosophy at the University of York and University of Sheffield. A writer and sculptor, she worked at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath in the 2000s, the site from which the planet Uranus was discovered. She is the author of five novels, including “The Wilderness,” which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009. “Orbital” is the first Booker Prize winner to be set in space and the second-shortest book to be awarded the prize.
This year, the Booker Prize judges considered a total of 156 novels published in the U.K. or Ireland between October 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024.
