British author Samantha Harvey has become the first woman since 2019 to win the Booker Prize.

His book Orbital, about astronauts looking back at Earth, was named winner of the £50,000 prize and trophy at a ceremony held at Old Billingsgate in the City of London.

Harvey, who was shortlisted for the prestigious literary prize in 2009 for her debut novel The Wilderness, is the 19th woman to win the prize since the first prize in 1969. There have been 36 male winners.

On stage, she dedicated the prize to “all those who speak for and not against the earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, of other life and to all those who speak, call and work for peace” .

Harvey also said, “I guess it’s fair to say that no Booker speech has ever been given in a perfect world.

“It’s hard not to recognize the imperfections of the world we live in today.”

The novelist, who almost gave up writing the book, said she originally thought “Why on earth would anyone want to hear a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space when people have actually been there.” , and I lost my cool over it.”

Five years ago, the gong was jointly awarded to two women, British author Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other and Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood for the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments.

It was last won by a British author when Glasgow-born Douglas Stuart was named winner of the 2020 Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain.

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “Orbital wins the prize in a year of geopolitical crisis, possibly the hottest year in recorded history.

“A book about a planet ‘shaped by the incredible force of human need’, about a ‘limitless place’, with no wall or barrier visible from space, with all the politics ‘an attack on its gentleness’, it is full hopeful, timely and timeless.”

This year, a record number of women were shortlisted for the Booker, with five nominees in total.

Artist and jury president Edmund de Waal was asked about the optics if the only man on the list, Percival Everett, won for James, a powerful retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the point of view of Jim, the slave.

Mr de Waal rejected the suggestion, saying “there was no doubt that anyone could have won, whatever their background, whatever their gender, whatever their ethnicity, whatever, absolutely anyone.”

“There was absolutely no box-ticking, no agenda or anything else in the room,” he added.

“It was simply a novel.”

At 136 pages, Orbital is the second shortest Booker winner, just behind Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which won the 1979 prize.

Harvey’s novel takes place over a 24-hour period, with 16 orbits around the Earth, and discusses the death of a loved one, the arrival of a typhoon and the fragility of human life.

Mr de Waal said: “As judges, we were determined to find a book that touches us, a book that has reach and resonance, that we are compelled to share.

“We wanted everything. Orbital is our book.

“Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets.

“Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts from the International Space Station circle the Earth and observe weather changes across the fragility of borders and time zones.

“With his language full of lyricism and acuity, Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.

“All year we celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than ranting about problems, 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 care for the precious and precarious world we share.”

This year’s judges were all in agreement on the choice and included novelist Sara Collins, Guardian editor Justine Jordan, Chinese-born professor and writer of A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers Yiyun Li and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney, who collaborated with Sir Paul McCartney and won a lifetime achievement gong from Ivor Novello.

BBC director general Tim Davie joked at the event that he had a “football presenting job” up for grabs after the corporation confirmed on Tuesday that Gary Lineker would leave Match Of The Day at the end of the season.

Lineker, 63, who has presented the highlights program since 1999, has extended his contract with the channel until the 2026 World Cup, the BBC said.

Earlier on Tuesday, the shortlisted authors – Yael van der Wouden, Rachel Kushner, Anne Michaels, Charlotte Wood, Everett and Harvey – attended a reception with the Queen, her first public engagement since falling ill with an infection pulmonary.

On the Royal Family

Last year’s winner was Irish author Paul Lynch with his dystopian novel Prophet Song.