‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey wins first-ever Climate Fiction Prize » Yale Climate Connections

The 2024 novel “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey has been awarded the first-ever Climate Fiction Prize. The £10,000 ($13,240) prize, organized by a storytelling organization called Climate Spring, recognizes U.K. authors whose novels address the problem.

“Many of us already see tackling climate as important,” the organizers wrote on the prize website. “But we don’t always know how we should respond. Fiction can help us imagine what change can look like.”

The winning novel, set on the International Space Station, explores a day in the lives of six humans in space as they speed over the vulnerable blue planet below.

The prize is a long time coming – it’s an idea that has been tossed around for more than a decade.

It was in 2014 that Daniel Bloom, widely credited with coining “cli-fi,” first proposed a set of annual awards for climate fiction – on the screen. But the “Cliffies” were quickly forgotten.

That’s not for lack of potential nominees for such a prize. For his 2015 study, independent scholar Adam Trexler assembled a list of 150 previously published works that might plausibly be classified as climate fiction. From the last decade, I would guess, at least that many more could be added to the total. The annual outpouring warrants annual recognition, and not just by an award that’s limited to the U.K.

Included in the list below are the winning title, the four other books with which it was short-listed in March, and the other four books with which it was longlisted in November.

As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers. When two dates of publication are listed, the second is for the release of the paperback edition.

Orbital: A Novel by Samantha Harvey (Grove Atlantic 2023/2024, 224 pages, $17.00 paperback)

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts – from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan – have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over 17,000 miles an hour as the Earth reels below. We are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of 16 sunrises and sunsets and the bright constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

And So I Roar: A Novel by Abi Dare (Dutton 2024, 400 pages, $28.00)

When Tia accidentally overhears a whispered conversation between her mother – terminally ill and lying in a hospital bed in Port Harcourt, Nigeria – and her aunt, the repercussions will send her on a desperate quest. It’s the beginning of a harrowing ordeal that will see Tia forced to make a terrible choice between protecting Adunni, the runaway she has taken in, or finally learning the secret her mother has hidden from her. And Adunni will learn that her “louding voice,” as she calls it, is more important than ever, as she must advocate to save not only herself but all the young women of her home village. If she succeeds, she may transform Ikati into a place where girls are allowed to claim the bright futures they deserve – and shout their stories to the world.

The Morningside: A Novel by Tea Obreht (Random House 2024/2025, 320 pages $18.00 paperback)

After being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-so-distant future, Silvia and her mother finally settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in Island City where Silvia’s aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive and because the once-vibrant city where she lives now is half-underwater. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give the young girl glimpses of her demolished homeland. Enchanted by Ena’s stories, Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities; she becomes obsessed with the older woman who lives in the penthouse. The Morningside is a novel about the stories we tell to make sense of where we came from and who we hope to be.

Briefly Very Beautiful: A Novel by Roz Dineen (Harry N. Abrams Book 2024, 336 pages, $28.00)

In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three small children by herself in the city. Her husband, Nathaniel, has gone all too willingly to serve as a medic in an overseas war. His absence, and Cass’s isolation, has brought her into an exhausted but harmonious rhythm with the children. When things start to feel more dangerous in the city, Cass evacuates with the children, first to her mother-in-law’s house deep in the countryside, and then to a seemingly harmonious commune on the coast. In this magnetic novel about resilience, Dineen creates a society that feels both unrecognizable and chillingly familiar. The result is a compelling portrait of what it is to parent through apocalypse.

The Ministry of Time: A Novel by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press 2024/2025, 368 pages, $18.99 paperback)

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and only then told what she’ll be working on. She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with and monitoring Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. An exquisitely original fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time asks: What does it mean to defy history? Bradley’s answer is a testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.

Private Rites: A Novel by Julia Armfield (Flatiron Books 2024, 304 pages, $27.99)

It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and old rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father, an architect as cruel as he was revered, dies. His death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is broken by a revelation in his will. But something even more sinister might be unfolding. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.

Water Baby: A Novel by Chioma Okereke (Quercus Books 2024/2025, 17.99 paperback)

In Makoko, the floating slum off mainland Lagos, Nigeria, 19-year-old Baby yearns for an existence where she can escape the future her father has planned for her. With opportunities scarce, Baby jumps at the chance to join a newly launched drone-mapping project, aimed at broadening the visibility of her community. Then a video of her at work goes viral and Baby finds herself with options she could never have imagined – including the possibility of leaving her birthplace to represent Makoko on the world stage. But will life beyond the lagoon be everything she’s dreamed of? Or has everything she wants been in front of her all along?

The Mars House: A Novel by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury Publishing 2024/2025, 480 pages, $19.99 paperback)

In the wake of an environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London’s Royal Ballet, has become a refugee in Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. There, January’s life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger — a person whose body is not adjusted to lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. January’s job choices, housing, and even transportation are dictated by this second-class status, and now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse: Gale wants all Earthstrongers to naturalize, a process that is always disabling and sometimes deadly. With these threads, Pulley weaves a story of personal, political, and planetary transformation.

Praiseworthy: A Novel by Alexis Wright (New Directions 2024, 672 pages, $22.95)

In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious haze cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A visionary on his own holy quest, Cause Man Steel seeks the perfect platinum donkey to launch an Aboriginal-owned donkey transport industry, saving Country and the world from fossil fuels. His wife, Dance, studies butterflies and dreams of repatriating her family to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to end it all by walking into the sea. Their other child, Tommyhawk, wants nothing more than to be adopted by Australia’s most powerful white woman. Praiseworthy is an epic masterpiece that bends time and reality – a cry of outrage against oppression, greed, and assimilation.