Samantha Harvey wins for Orbital

Samantha Harvey won the 2024 Booker Prize for her book Orbital.

The award was announced at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. You can watch the live feed below.

Australian author Charlotte Wood was one of the six authors shortlisted.

This year, five women – the highest number in the prize’s 55-year history – and one man made the cut, representing five countries.

Wood was shortlisted for her highly acclaimed film Stone Yard devotional, It traces one woman’s rejection of the modern world for a life of service, contemplation and devotion in a rural NSW nunnery.

The American Rachel Kushner was nominated Creation Lake and his fellow American Percival Everett for James – a new interpretation of Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Canadian author Anne Michaels was also shortlisted for Held, The English writer Samantha Harvey for Orbital and Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch author nominated for her debut novel,The safe.

According to the jury, each of the shortlisted novels contains meditations on exile, identity and belonging, as well as on “the gravitational forces that the places we call home exert on us”.

When Wood found out she was a finalist in July, he thanked her publisher for his trust Stone Yard Devotionaland the judges for “the level of complexity and sophistication of their comments.”