2024 Booker prize goes to Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital, set over 24 hours on the ISS

Samantha Harvey, who has won the UK’s top fiction award, the Booker prize, for her novel Orbital, has created a new genre: nature writing about space.

“I see it as a kind of space pastoral,” Harvey told the New Scientist podcast earlier in the year. “I wanted to see what you could do with words in a painterly way to try to conjure up that rapturous, joyful, extraordinary and also now somewhat grief-stricken view of the Earth.”

Orbital takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station (ISS). There are six…