Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital. “I’m definitely not what you would probably call a space nerd,” she told NPR in 2023. But ever since she was a child, she has been fascinated by the experiences of astronauts.

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Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images

Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her science fiction novel Orbital. The novel follows six astronauts as they orbit Earth for one day of their nine-month space mission.

The Booker Prize is considered the most prestigious literary prize for English fiction published in Great Britain and Ireland. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, who won twice for her novels The Testaments And The blind murderer and Paul Lynch, who won the 2023 Booker Prize for his book Prophet song.

Orbital beat five other finalists on the Booker shortlist: Held by Anne Michaels, The Lake of Creation by Rachel Kushner, The safe by Yael van der Wouden, Stone Yard devotional by Charlotte Wood and James by Percival Everett.

Harvey’s astronauts – from the US, Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan – see 16 sunrises and sunsets in the novel’s 24-hour span. In 2023, Harvey told NPR’s Ari Shapiro that watching the Earth’s orbits through videos from the ISS helped inspire the book: “I was so overwhelmed by the extraordinary beauty and strangeness of our planet,” she said.

Harvey wanted Orbital, “more than anything, to be a book about beauty, and about joy, and about… the rapture of looking at something so beautiful that also happens to be our home.”

Orbital also won the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.