British author Samantha Harvey has won the Booker Prize for her novel "Orbital," which focuses on six astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Most bets were on Percival Everett’s “James,” but the judges chose Harvey’s “beautiful, miraculous” novel, which is set aboard a space station.

Peter Carey, a two-time winner of the Booker Prize, always refers to literary prizes as a “crapshoot”. Sadly for Charlotte Wood, who was hoping to become the first Australian woman author to win the coveted and influential prize for fiction written in English,