LONDON: Britain’s Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, a story about a single day aboard the International Space Station which she wrote during Covid-19 lockdowns.

The novel, Harvey’s fifth, was the top selling book on the shortlist of six finalists and has sold more copies than the past three Booker Prize winners combined, as readers lapped up her depiction of earth’s beauty as seen from space. Judges of the prize, now in its 55th year, praised her writing for the “intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world”.

Past winners of the prestigious Booker, which is open to works of fiction written in English, include Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Yann Martel.

Harvey said she wrote the novel while stuck at home during the pandemic watching footage of the earth in low orbit on her screen. She likened the experience of her six characters “trapped in a tin can” to that of lockdown.

Set over 24 hours, the astronauts and cosmonauts of her 136 page-story witness sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets as they circle the globe. “Everyone and no one is the subject,” said Edmund de Waal, chair of the 2024 judges. “With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.” Harvey walks away with a 50,000 pound prize which she told the BBC she would spend on a new bike.

Published in Dawn, November 14th, 2024