British writer and Booker Prize 2024 shortlisted author Samantha Harvey poses with her book 'Orbital' during the Booker Prize 2024 Award photo call event, at the Southbank centre, in central London, on 11 November, 2024. Photo: HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP
Orbital, a slim poetic novel following six astronauts over a day onboard the International Space Station, has won the Booker Prize for 2024.
The novel by British author Samantha Harvey was the shortest of the six books shortlisted for the prize at just 136 pages.
The award was announced at a ceremony in London.
The win was something of a surprise. Most critics and bookmakers had installed James by American author Percival Everett, the story of the slave in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, as the favourite.
Recently the Booker Prize, which bills itself as the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, has tended to attract betting - and follow the bookmakers' picks
When Orbital was picked for the Booker shortlist, the judges said it was a kind of "love letter to our planet".
Harvey said she set herself the challenge of writing about amazement. The astronauts witness again and again the extraordinary sunrises and sunsets, as well as huge weather events, as the space station circles the earth dozens of times in a day.
She wanted to write not as sci-fi, but like a nature writer.
She had been longlisted before for the Booker Prize - its pick of the 13 novels it will consider for a shortlist out of around 160 novels nominated a year - for her 2009 novel The Wilderness, about a man unravelling with Alzheimer's.
Harvey dedicated her win to "all people who work for the Earth", quoting the astronomer Carl Sagan.
She told the audience in London she had nearly given up writing Orbital, feeling that nobody would want to hear from a desk-bound writer in Wiltshire England on the wonders of space.
Harvey said she could recall watching last year's Booker Prize win by her friend Paul Lynch for Prophet Song.
"I was overcome watching him win," she said. "I am overcome now. I was not expecting this."
This year's Booker Prize was remarkable for the make-up of the shortlist; it featured five women and one man. They were Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake), Anne Michaels (Held), Samantha Harvey (Orbital), Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional) and Yael van der Wouden (The Safekeep), along with Everett (James).
The 2024 Booker is the 10th since the criteria for the award was widened from Commonwealth writers only, to any author writing in English whose novel is published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Everett and Kushner are American, and the list saw the first Dutch author, van der Wouden, shortlisted.
Wood was the first Australian nominee in a decade.
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