Inconvenient truth about this year's Booker winner

Samantha Harvey's ‘Orbital', a meditation on the Earth and humanity, has scooped this year's prize. But Martin Chilton is sceptical it will make readers wake up to climate change

- Martin Chilton

The Booker Prize is billed as "the world's most significant award for a single work of fiction". It's big business nowadays, promoted with internet events, talks, signings and a social media fanfare feeding 400,000 TikTok followers. I almost wish that deadpan football pundit Roy Keane was on duty for the ceremony itself, muttering “Lots of presentations… lots of hullabaloo… a lot of nonsense. Writing? That’s their job.”

Don’t get me wrong: 2024 winner Samantha Harvey has done a fine job with Orbital, which takes place over a single day in space. It’s a graceful, insightful meditation on the Earth and humanity and a worthy winner, despite not being the bookies’ favourite. The front runner was James, by American writer Percival Everett, a novel that puts James, the escaped slave Jim from Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at the centre of the action. I gave the novel four stars in April, enjoying its droll, clever, lacerating story.

Prize awards aside, it’s fruitless and almost impossible to pick between the merits of two such different novels. What is hard to believe, though, is that the Booker judges would have risked the fallout from trumpeting a shortlist dominated by “the highest number of women in the prize’s 55-year history” and, being fully aware that the prize has gone only six times to women since 2008, then handed the £50,000 award to the shortlist’s sole man. Edmund de Waal, chair of the judges, was asked specifically whether the only male writer had a “genuine chance” and insisted the decision “wasn’t a tick-box exercise”. He said the panel was unanimous that Harvey, the only Brit in the running (she was born in Kent in 1975), was the right choice.