British author Samantha Harvey has won the Booker Prize for her concise novel Orbital, which follows six astronauts reflecting on Earth from the International Space Station. This marks Harvey’s fifth novel; her previous works include a memoir on insomnia and novels centered on nature, such as the acclaimed All Is Song and Dear Thief. Harvey surpassed fellow finalists Anne Michaels (Held), Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake), Yael van der Wouden (The Safekeep), Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional), and Percival Everett (James) to win the £50,000 prize and trophy.
The judges praised Orbital as a “fearlessly slow meditation on space, beauty, and human aspiration,” calling it “a new kind of nature writing.” The award was presented at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London, with last year’s winner, Paul Lynch, presenting the prize. In her acceptance speech, Harvey dedicated the award to those who “speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans and other life, and all those who work for peace.”
Spanning a single day, Harvey’s Orbital tracks the crew of the ISS from Japan, Russia, the United States, Britain, and Italy as they observe and reflect on their home planet, witnessing 16 sunrises and sunsets, spinning past continents, cycling through seasons and looking at glaciers, deserts, swells of oceans and the peaks of mountains. The astronauts are a mix of professionals and amateurs, male and female, who come from all walks of life and speak many languages. Their observations are punctuated by the claustrophobic tension of living in a confined space. The story touches on mourning, desire, and the climate crisis.
After the announcement, Orbital was the biggest-selling book on this year’s shortlist, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK. It was the shortest-winning Booker since Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1979 novel Offshore, which came in at just 132 pages. The book has already won several literary awards in the US and Canada, including the PEN/Faulkner award.
Harvey is the first woman to win since Margaret Atwood in 2019 for The Testaments and the only British writer on this year’s shortlist. She becomes the 21st woman to make it onto the Booker longlist in its 55-year history. The shortlist featured more women than ever, with five of the six female finalists. The prize was expanded a decade ago to include authors from outside the UK, causing American writers to dominate Booker shortlists in recent years. Some criticized the prize’s prestige, but judges praised Harvey for introducing a fresh perspective to the shortlist. She now hopes to repeat the success of Orbital with a follow-up to her acclaimed memoir, which is reportedly due in 2025.
