A short novel by British author Samantha Harvey is among the winners of the prestigious Booker Prize 2024
Samantha Harvey, a British novelist, won the 2024 Booker Prize for Fiction for her short story set on the International Space Station.
For her “space pastoral” tale “Orbital,” which chronicles the lives of six astronauts on the ISS as they orbit the planet, Harvey received the USD 64,000 prize. The award presentation took place in London’s Old Billingsgate on Tuesday evening.
The awarding organization claims that the 49-year-old novelist is the first female Booker Prize winner since 2019.
“A novel about a wounded planet is one of the year’s most memorable works of literature. There are times when you come upon a book and are unable to figure out how this extraordinary thing occurred. As judges, our goal was to identify a book that touched us, had depth and resonance, and that we felt obligated to share. Edmund de Waal, the chair of the judges, said, “We wanted everything.”
The beauty of sixteen sunsets and sixteen sunrises propels the book, according to De Waal, who also notes that Harvey’s “language of lyricism and acuity makes our world strange and new for us.”
According to the author, she spent several hours watching ISS video online while writing the book during the COVID-induced lockdowns.
As an aside, Harvey has said that she does not own a cell phone.
“All the people who speak for and not against the Earth and work for and not against peace” is the dedication she made to the award.
“Why would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space when people have actually been there?” she claimed she asked herself while she was writing the book.
“I lost my nerve with it and I thought I didn’t have the authority to write it.”
Harvey said in an interview after her inclusion on the prize’s longlist that she regarded J.G. Farrell’s “The Siege of Krishnapur,” which is based on a fictitious Indian town, as one of the greatest novels of the previous century.
Samantha Harvey, a builder’s daughter born in Kent in 1975, attended the Universities of York and Sheffield to study philosophy. In the 2000s, she worked as a writer and sculptor at Bath’s Herschel Museum of Astronomy, where the planet Uranus was found.
She is the author of five books and now tutors students at Bath Spa University’s MA program in Creative Writing.
In 2009, she was on the Booker Prize shortlist for her first book, “The Wilderness,” which tells the story of an elderly architect with Alzheimer’s. The Betty Trask Prize was given to the book.
Before “Orbital,” she had written a book called “The Western Wind” about a priest in Somerset in the fifteenth century.
‘The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping,’ Harvey’s first nonfiction book, was released in 2020 and chronicled her own experience with insomnia.
She is on the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, the Women’s Prize, and the James Tait Black Award. Granta Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Telegraph, and TIME magazine have all published her work.The lter Scott Prize
