British author Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize award with her latest novel Orbital.
The novel was announced as the winner at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate Market in London on Tuesday. Harvey’s book is the first story set in space to win the prestigious prize.
The book follows the tale of six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station.
Harvey is the first woman to win the award since 2019. Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo shared the award that year. The Booker winner takes home a £50,000 cash prize.
Accepting the award, Harvey dedicated the prize to “all the people who speak for and not against the Earth and work for and not against peace”.
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Harvey later added that she questioned herself while writing the book and almost gave up.
“I lost my nerve with it and I thought I didn’t have the authority to write it,” she said.”Why would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space when people have actually been there?”
Speaking with the BBC after the win, Harvey said she was “in complete shock and very overwhelmed”. When asked how she would spend her cash prize, she told the broadcaster: “I need to buy myself a new bike, and it’s going to be a good bike.”
This year’s other nominees were the other nominees were: Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner, Anne Michaels, Yael van der Wouden, and Charlotte Wood.
Artist and chairman of the Booker jury Edmund de Waal described Harvey’s Orbital as a “book about a wounded world.”
“As judges, we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share,” he said.
“Orbital is our book. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity, Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.”
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