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Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Man Booker Prize for her novel Orbit, which tells the story of a day in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station.
The award ceremony took place in London, and this year the jury was headed by the British writer and artist Edmund de Waal.
He said the entire team unanimously preferred Samantha Harvey’s novel.
“Sometimes you come across a book and cannot understand how this wonderful event happened. As judges, we were determined to find a book that moved us, that had the capacity and resonance that we wanted to share,” said de Waal.
Harvey became the first woman to win the prize since 2019, and Orbit became the best-selling shortlisted book in the UK.
It is the first Booker Prize-winning book set in space, and also the shortest novel, at just 136 pages.
“This compact yet beautiful novel invites us to observe the magnificence of the Earth while reflecting on the individual and collective value of each human life,” the prize said in a statement.
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In addition to Harvey, the shortlist includes the books “The Lake of Creation” by the American Rachel Kushner, “The Vault” by the Dutch-Israeli writer Yael van der Wouden, “Held” by the Canadian Anne Michaels, “Prayer in a Stone Bag” by the Australian Charlotte Wood and the novel “James” by the American Percival Everett.
The prize is open to works of fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in Britain or Ireland within the last year.
The prize has been awarded since 1969.
