British writer Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for 2024 with her novel "Orbital", the first award-winning book set in space.
"Orbital" observes the world from a different perspective as it follows a team of astronauts on the International Space Station.
"Orbital" is the best-selling book shortlisted for the Booker in Great Britain, and it has also outsold the previous three Booker winners combined, by the time the winner is announced.
Harvey, the first woman to win the award since 2019, was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London's Old Billingsgate and will take home £50.000.
She dedicated the award to "all people who speak for, not against the Earth and work for, not against, peace".
She said she questioned herself while writing the book:
"Why would anyone want to hear from a woman sitting at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space when, in fact, people have already been there? I got annoyed and thought I had no right to write about it," Harvey said.
In an interview with the BBC, after the announcement of the winner, Harvey said that she was "in complete shock and very emotional".
She added that the award will change her life.
Asked how she would spend the £50.000 prize money, she said: "I have to buy myself a new bike and it will be a good bike."
The president of the Booker jury Edmund de Val described "Orbital" as "a book about a wounded world".
He said that all the members of the jury recognized her "beauty and ambition" and praised her "language of lyricism".
Harvey explained that when she wrote "Orbital," she was "thinking about space pastoral—a kind of writing about the nature and beauty of space."
The 136-page story, which is Samantha Harvey's fifth novel, takes place in one day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts.
During those 24 hours they observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over their quiet blue planet, which spins past the continents and passes through the seasons, encompassing glaciers and deserts, mountain peaks and ocean waves.
The Booker Prize was established in 1969 with a very clear purpose – to draw attention to exceptional novels from the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, South Africa and Zimbabwe, giving authors from these countries a platform to excel in the world of English-language literature.
The Booker Prize was never awarded to a writer for his entire work, as is the case with the Nobel Prize, but for a novel that was published during the previous year.
Precisely because of this, there are four literary names that received this award twice - Peter Carey, J. M. Kuci, Hilary Mantel and Margaret Atwood, who won the Booker for the novels "Blind Killer" and "Testimonies" (a sequel to her best-known novel "The Handmaid's Tale").
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