British writer Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for fiction on Tuesday (Nov 12) with Orbital, a short, wonder-filled novel set aboard the International Space Station that ponders the beauty and fragility of Earth.
Harvey was awarded the £50,000 (US$64,000) prize for what she has called a “space pastoral” about six orbiting astronauts, which she began writing during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. The confined characters loop through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over the course of a day, trapped in one another’s company and transfixed by the globe’s ever-changing vistas.
“To look at the Earth from space is like a child looking into a mirror and realising for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself,” said Harvey, who researched her novel by reading books by astronauts and watching the space station’s live camera. “What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves.”
She said the novel “is not exactly about climate change, but implied in the view of the Earth is the fact of human-made climate change”.
She dedicated the prize to everyone who speaks “for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life”.
“All the people who speak for and call for and work for peace – this is for you,” she said.
Writer and artist Edmund de Waal, who chaired the five-member judging panel, called Orbital a “miraculous novel” that “makes our world strange and new for us”.
Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, noted that “in a year of geopolitical crisis, likely to be the warmest year in recorded history”, the winning book was “hopeful, timely and timeless”.
Harvey, who has written four previous novels and a memoir about insomnia, is the first British writer since 2020 to win the Booker. The prize is open to English-language writers of any nationality and has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Previous winners include Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel.
De Waal praised the “crystalline” writing and “capaciousness” of Harvey’s succinct novel – at 136 pages in its UK paperback edition, one of the shortest-ever Booker winners.
“This is a book that repays slow reading,” he said.
He said the judges spent a full day picking their winner and came to a unanimous conclusion. Harvey beat five other finalists from Canada, the United States, Australia and the Netherlands, chosen from among 156 novels submitted by publishers.