On 12 November 2024, the Booker Prize was awarded to Samantha Harvey for Orbital, a novel of exceptional delicacy set aboard the International Space Station, where six astronauts and cosmonauts circle the Earth sixteen times a day, watching hurricanes, auroras and the thin line of the atmosphere from above.
The novel, at just 130 pages, was a radical departure from the family sagas and historical epics that usually dominate the prize. It had no plot in the conventional sense; instead it offered a profound meditation on the fragility of the planet, the pettiness and grandeur of human life, and the strange perspective granted by looking down on the world from the edge of space.
The jury called it a novel about our world from the perspective of the universe, and its win was seen as a vindication of small, ambitious, beautifully written books over commercial epics. Orbital’s success, together with a string of climate and space-themed works, was read as a sign that literary fiction was turning its attention outward, to the planet itself and the questions of survival and beauty it poses.