British writer Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize award for her fictional novel about space, Orbital.
According to BBC, Samantha received her sixth Booker Prize at a ceremony in London's Old Billingsgate on Tuesday night, November 13, 2024, and took home £50,000 ($64,000).
Orbital is a story about a team of astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) who have a completely different point of view about the world. This is the first novel about space that has won the Booker Prize.
Samantha is the only woman who has been winning the award since 2019.
Edmund de Waal, chair of judges, said, "It is 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," he continued.
The 49-year-old dedicated her award to “all the people who speak for and not against the Earth and work for and not against peace.”
Samantha revealed that while writing the book she questioned herself, "Why would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, and I thought I didn't have the authority to write it."
Furthermore, she has been previously shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Women’s Prize, and the Walther Scott Prize.
