Samantha Harvey Wins the £50,000 Booker Prize

Samantha Harvey is the first British writer to win the Booker since Douglas Stuart in 2020 for ‘Shuggie Bain.’

Samantha Harvey. Image: Booker Prize Foundation

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

De Waal: ‘A Book About a Wounded World’

This evening at London’s Billingsgate (November 12), the British author Samantha Harvey has been named winner of the 2024 Booker Prize for Fiction for her short novel Orbital (Penguin Random House/Jonathan Cape).

PRH’s Jonathan Cape, has published six previous Booker Prize winners, more than any other publisher: The Conservationist (1974); Saville (1976); Midnight’s Children (1981); Hotel du Lac (1984); The Famished Road (1991); and The Sense of an Ending (2011).

Harvey’s book was selected from a shortlist that comprised the work of authors from five markets: Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The award was presented to Harvey by Paul Lynch, last year’s winner for Prophet Song from Juliet Mabey’s Oneworld. This year’s award event was hosted by Samira Ahmed and broadcast live as a special episode of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row.

Booker organizers note that in the UK, Orbital has been the biggest-selling title on this year’s shortlist. In the 10 months between its publication in November 2023 and its shortlisting in September this year, the book had sold 3,500 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan data, the Booker Prize Foundation says.

Orbital now has sold 29,000 copies, 2,000 of which were sold in the last week alone. In fact, Orbital, according to the foundation, has sold more copies overall than the last three Booker Prize winners combined had sold before they won.

Orbital reportedly was the bookmaker William Hill’s joint favorite to win the 2024 Booker Prize 2024, along with James by Percival Everett.

Paul Lynch’s 2023 Winner, ‘Prophet Song’

Paul Lynch, the 2023 Booker Prize winner for ‘Prophet Song,’ presented the prize at the November 12 ceremony for Samantha Harvey’s 2024 ‘Orbital’ win. Image: Booker Prize Foundation

In more of the sales-impact details that the Booker Prize Foundation has become the world leader in providing, the program offers these data points tonight:

Related story: The UK’s £50,000 Booker Prize for Fiction Names Its 2024 Shortlist.Image: Booker Prize Foundation

• “The Booker Prize 2023 was won by Paul Lynch with Prophet Song, which saw a 1500-percent increase in sales in the week after its win.
• “In the year since, sales of the English-language edition of Prophet Song have increased by more than half-a-million copies, with sales across all formats now totaling more than 560,000 worldwide.
• “Translation rights deals increased from two before Prophet Song’s longlisting to 13 before its win.
• “A total of 36 deals have now been secured, with a number of publishers buying Lynch’s complete backlist, too.
• “Since his win, Lynch has participated in over 300 media interviews and appeared at numerous festivals in countries ranging from Dubai to India, Holland to Greece, and the United States to Malta.
• “In September, Lynch was awarded the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction, which he accepted at a ceremony in Ohio on Sunday (November 10).”

Beyond being sterling indicators of the type of attention the Booker’s program commands in the densely crowded field of book awards, points of this kind help the industry understand that some awards programs can deliver actual business impact.

Wood: ‘Hopeful, Timely, and Timeless’

At 136 pages, Harvey’s winning book is the second-shortest book to win the prize and covers the briefest timeframe of any book on the shortlist, taking place over just 24 hours.

Orbital is Samantha Harvey’s fifth novel. Its story takes place in a day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station.  Harvey has referred to it in an interview as “space pastoral—a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space, with a slightly nostalgic sense of what’s disappearing.”

Jurors for this year’s Booker Prize are Edmund de Waal; Yiyun Li; Justine Jordan; Sara Collins; and Nitin Sawhney.

Edmund de Waal

De Waal, speaking for the panel as chair in his rationale, said that Orbital is “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. ..,

“All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognizes its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.”

Gaby Wood

The Booker Prize Foundation CEO Gaby Wood said, “Orbital wins the prize in a year of geopolitical crisis, likely to be the warmest year in recorded history. A book about a planet ‘shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want,’ about an ‘unbounded place’ with no wall or barrier visible from space, with all politics ‘an assault on its gentleness’, it is hopeful, timely, and timeless.”

Harvey was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 for her debut published novel, The Wilderness. The Booker Prize for Fiction, which is distinct from the International Booker Prize for translated literature, was last won by a British author when Douglas Stuart won in 2020 for Shuggie Bain.

The 2024 Booker Prize Shortlist

More from Publishing Perspectives on the Booker Prize for Fiction is here. More on the International Booker Prize is here, more on both Booker Prize programs is here. And more from us on the international industry’s many book and publishing awards programs overall is here.