LONDON – British author Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for fiction on Tuesday for “Orbital,” a short, wonder-filled novel set on the International Space Station.

Harvey was awarded 50,000 pounds ($64,000) for what he called a “space pastoral” about six astronauts orbiting the Earth, which he began writing during the COVID-19 pandemic quarantines. The circumscribed characters go through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over the course of a day, trapped next to each other and stunned by the fragile beauty of the world.

Writer and artist Edmund de Waal, who chaired the five-member judging panel, called the book a “miraculous novel” that “makes our world strange and new to us.”

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that “in a year of geopolitical crisis that will likely be the hottest in recorded history”, the winning book was “hopeful, timely and timeless”.

Harvey, who has previously written four novels and a memoir about insomnia, became the first British author to win the Booker prize since 2020. The award is open to English-speaking writers of all nationalities and is renowned for transforming writers’ careers. Previous winners include Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel.

De Waal praised the “crystalline” writing and “capacity” of Harvey’s concise novel, which runs 136 pages in the UK paperback edition and is one of the shortest Booker winners to date.

“This is a book that pays off in slow reading,” he said.

He said the jury spent a full day choosing the winner and came to a unanimous conclusion. Harvey beat out five finalists from Canada, the US, Australia and the Netherlands, chosen from 156 novels submitted by the publishers.

American author Percival Everett was the bookies’ favorite with “James,” which reimagined Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the main black character, enslaved man Jim.

Other finalists are American author Rachel Kushner’s espionage story “Creation Lake”; Canadian Anne Michaels’ poetic novel “Hold”; Charlotte Wood’s Australian epic “Stone Yard Devotion”; and “The Safekeep” by Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch author to be shortlisted at the Booker.

Although Harvey is the first woman to win the Booker since 2019, she is one of five women on this year’s shortlist, the largest in the prize’s 55-year history. De Waal said issues such as writers’ gender or nationality were “background noise” that did not influence the jury.

“There was absolutely no checking of boxes, agendas or anything else. It was just about the novel,” he said before the awards ceremony at Old Billingsgate, a large Victorian fish market in central London.

Established in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to novels originally written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. Last year’s winner was Irish author Paul Lynch with his post-democratic dystopia “The Prophet’s Song.”