British author Samantha Harvey Wins Booker Prize for 'Obital'

British female writer Samantha Harvey has won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Britain, for her novel Orbital.

Harvey was called the Booker Prize winner at the 2024 Booker Prize Awards in Old Billingsgate, London, where a short story about six astronauts circling the Earth during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown will give him £50,000 in prize money and about 70 million won in our money.

Harvey is the first female writer to win the Booker Prize since 2019 and the first British winner to win it since 2020.

Harvey, who has written four novels and experiential works on insomnia so far, was also nominated for a Booker Prize in 2009 for his debut novel, The Wilderness.

Harvey's "Obital" tells the story of the 16 sunrises and sunsets that six astronauts, including two men and four women from the U.S., Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan, go through on the ISS for 24 hours, human desires revealed in the process, and the climate crisis.

Harvey said he dedicates the award to "everyone who does not advocate or oppose the dignity of other humans and other life forms."

Looking at the Earth from space is like a child who looks into a mirror and first realizes that the person in the mirror is himself, he said, stressing that "what we do to Earth is what we do to ourselves."

Author and artist Edmund DeWal, who chaired the five-member jury, called the 136-page "Obital" a "miracle novel that makes our world strange and new" and "worth reading slowly."

Booker Prize Foundation President Gabby Wood said this year will be a deepening geopolitical crisis, possibly the hottest year ever, and stressed that the award-winning work at such a time is "hopeful, timely and timeless."

A total of 156 novels were submitted to this year's Booker Prize, of which five were submitted from the United States, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, along with Harvey's novels, were shortlisted.

Among the six finalists this year, five were women, the most in Booker's 55-year history.

Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize selects winners for novels written in English published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.

Previous winners include Ian McCuan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantle. Last year, Irish author Paul Lynch was honored with the Booker Prize for his dystopian novel, Prophet Song.

This year's Nobel Prize winner Han Kang has become a global writer in 2016 after winning the Man Booker International (currently the International Booker Prize), the international category of the Booker Prize.