British writer Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for fiction on November 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 ($64,000) prize for what she has called a “space pastoral” about six orbiting astronauts, which she began writing during the 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”.
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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.
‘Hopeful, timely, and timeless’
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”. The judging panel also included award-winning British Indian musician Nitin Sawhney, novelist Sara Collins, fiction editor of The Guardian newspaper Justine Jordan, and Chinese American writer and professor Yiyun Li.
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.
At just 136 pages long, the winning title is the second-shortest book to win the prize and covers the briefest time frame of any book on the shortlist, taking place over just 24 hours.
De Waal said the judges spent a full day picking their winner and came to a unanimous conclusion. Harvey beat five other finalists from Canada, the US, Australia, and the Netherlands, chosen from among 156 novels submitted by publishers.
No agendas, ‘simply about the novel’
American writer Percival Everett had been the bookies’ favourite to win with James, which reimagines Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of its main Black character, the enslaved man Jim.
The other finalists were American writer Rachel Kushner’s spy story Creation Lake; Canadian Anne Michaels’ poetic novel Held; Charlotte Wood’s Australian saga Stone Yard Devotional; and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch author to be shortlisted for the Booker.
Harvey is the first female Booker winner since 2019, though one of five women on this year’s shortlist, the largest number in the prize’s 55-year history. De Waal said issues such as the gender or nationality of the authors were “background noise” that did not influence the judges.
“There was absolutely no question of box ticking or of agendas or of anything else. It was simply about the novel,” he said before the awards ceremony at Old Billingsgate, a grand former Victorian fish market in central London.
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Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to novels originally written in English and published in the U.K. or Ireland. Last year’s winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for post-democratic dystopia Prophet Song.
Lynch handed Harvey her Booker trophy at the ceremony, warning her that her life was about to change dramatically because of the Booker publicity boost. Prophet Song saw a 1,500 per cent increase in sales in the week after its win. In the year since, sales of the English-language edition of his book have increased by more than half a million copies, with sales across all formats now totalling more than 5,60,000 worldwide.
Harvey said she was “overwhelmed” but remained down-to-earth about spending her prize money. She said she would disburse “some of it on tax. I want to buy a new bike. And then the rest—I want to go to Japan.”
(with inputs from agencies)
