British author Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize with her novel Orbital, the first book to win the award.

Orbital looks at the world from a different perspective as it follows a team of astronauts on the International Space Station.

It became the best-selling shortlisted book in the UK and, by the eve of their success, had sold more copies than the last three Booker winners combined.

Harvey, the first woman to win the award since 2019, was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London’s Old Billingsgate and will take home a prize of £50,000.

He dedicated the award to “all those who speak for the world, not against it, and who work for peace, not against it.”

She said she questioned herself while writing the book: “Why would anyone want a woman sitting at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space when people are actually out there?”

“I lost my nerve about it and thought I didn’t have the authority to write it.”

Judge chairman Edmund de Waal described Orbital as “a book about a wounded world”.

He said the judges all appreciated the film’s “beauty and ambition” and praised its “language of lyricism.”

When writing it, Harvey said he “thought of it as a space idyll, a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space.”

The 136-page novella, Harvey’s fifth novel, takes place over a single day in the lives of six astronauts and cosmonauts.

During these 24 hours, they observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets on their silent blue planet, circling between continents and crossing seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, mountain peaks and ocean waves.

The second shortest book to win the prize, it covers the shortest time period of all the books on the shortlist. The shortest winning novel in the award’s history was Penelope Fitzgerald’s 132-page novel Offshore from 1979.

Harvey previously told BBC Radio 4’s Front Row that he wrote Orbital during successive lockdowns.

“I was writing about six people trapped in a tin can. I felt like there was something that resonated with that and our experience of isolation, our inability to escape each other and our inability to reach other people.”

Harvey was previously longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 with his first novel, The Wilderness.

This year’s shortlist had five women on the six-strong shortlist; this was the largest number of women represented in its 55-year history.

Other candidates were:

• James – Percival Everett (USA)
• Creation Lake – Rachel Kushner (USA)
• Edited – Anne Michaels (Canada)
• Case – Yael van der Wouden (Netherlands)
• Devotion to the Stone Garden – Charlotte Wood (Australia)

The prestigious award is open to works of fiction written in English by authors from anywhere in the world and published in the UK or Ireland.

Previous winning authors include Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Bernardine Evaristo and Salman Rushdie.