The Booker judges are unanimous: Harvey's Orbital is out of this world
The Guardian|November 13, 2024
Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the only British writer shortlisted this year, has won the 2024 Booker prize, the UK's most prestigious prize for fiction.
Ella Creamer
The Booker judges are unanimous: Harvey's Orbital is out of this world

Harvey's tale of six fictional astronauts on the International Space Station was "unanimously" chosen as the winner after a "proper day" considering the six-strong shortlist, according to the chair of the judges, the artist and author Edmund de Waal. "Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition," he said. "It reflects Harvey's extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share."

Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters over the course of a day as they experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, is a "finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration", wrote Alexandra Harris in her Guardian review.

This story is from the November 13, 2024 edition of The Guardian.

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This story is from the November 13, 2024 edition of The Guardian.

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