Penguin Random House UK Celebrates Samantha Harvey's Booker Prize Win for "Orbital"
Samantha Harvey with her book and trophy. © Alberto Pezzali.
We are thrilled to announce that Samantha Harvey, the author of ORBITAL, published by Penguin Random House UK’s Jonathan Cape and Vintage UK imprints, was unanimously voted by the panel of deliberating judges, as the 2024 Booker winner, after reading more than 150 books over seven months.
The celebratory news was announced by Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in London. Harvey receives £50,000 and a trophy, which was presented to her by Paul Lynch, winner of the Booker Prize 2023. Edmund de Waal, describes the winner as ‘a book about a wounded world’, adding that the panel’s ‘unanimity about “Orbital” recognises its beauty and ambition.’
Taking place over 24 hours, ORBITAL follows a team of astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments, and test the limits of the human body. Yet, their primary task is observation. Circling Earth sixteen times a day, they witness the planet’s breathtaking beauty, from glaciers and deserts to the peaks of mountains and swells of oceans. Despite their distance from Earth, they cannot escape its pull, feeling deeply connected and protective of it. The novel explores profound questions about life, humanity, and our planet. “Harvey begins and ends with astonishment,” James Wood wrote in his review for The New Yorker.
ORBITAL is the first Booker Prize winner to be set in space and the second-shortest book to be awarded the prize.
Samantha Harvey, photo by Matt Lincoln.
Harvey describes her work as ‘a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space,’ referring to it as space pastoral. Born in Kent in 1975, Samantha Harvey studied philosophy at the University of York and University of Sheffield. A writer and sculptor, she worked at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath in the 2000s, the site from which the planet Uranus was discovered. She is the author of five novels, including THE WILDERNESS, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009.
Despite her latest book’s high-tech setting, Harvey herself leads a low-tech life, with no social media accounts and no mobile phone. She is the first woman to win the prize since 2019, when it was shared by Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood.
A huge out of this world congratulations to Samantha Harvey and to our PRH UK colleagues!
The Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in literature, celebrating the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. Winning the Booker Prize brings worldwide recognition. Of the six titles shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, five were Penguin Random House titles. We are immensely proud of the cultural impact of our books and our publishers.