British writer wins Booker Prize for space story
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 praised her writing for the “intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world.” 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 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets as they circle the globe.
