Congratulations to Samantha Harvey who has been named the winner of this year's Booker Prize for Orbital. The Booker Prize is a £50,000 literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK.

Orbital takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. Compact yet beautifully expansive, Orbital invites us to observe Earth’s splendour, whilst reflecting on the individual and collective value of every human life.  

British author Samantha Harvey, one of five women on a history-making shortlist, is the first woman to win the Booker Prize since 2019. Orbital has been the biggest-selling book on the shortlist in the UK, and has sold more copies than the past three Booker Prize-winners combined had sold up to the eve of their success. It is also the first Booker Prize-winning book set in space. At just 136 pages long, it is the second-shortest book to win the prize and covers the briefest timeframe of any book on the shortlist, taking place over just 24 hours.

Edmund de Waal, Chair of judges, said:

‘In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world. Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. We wanted everything.

Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones.  With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us. 

All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.’ 

Samantha Harvey said of writing Orbital:

‘I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space.’ 

Harvey was shortlisted alongside Percival Everett (James), Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake), Anne Michaels (Held), Yael van der Wouden (The Safekeep) and Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional)

Read more about The Booker Prize here, and see what our booksellers have to say about Orbital here.