Samantha Harvey poses with the prize and her book "Orbital" at the Booker Prize Awards 2024, in London.

The judges described Harvey’s "Orbital" as a “wonderful novel” whose “crystalline” style makes the world feel “strange and new”. British author Samantha Harvey has been awarded the Booker Prize for fiction for “Orbital,” an intense short novel that follows six international astronauts as they orbit the Earth aboard the International Space Station. Harvey won a £50,000 (€60,000) prize for what he called “space ranching” he began writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Restrained fictional characters wander between 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in a single day, caught up in each other’s company and haunted by ever-changing global landscapes. “To look at the Earth from space is like a child looking into a mirror and realising for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself," said Harvey. Photo by Luminish, Wikimedia commons.