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British writer Samantha Harvey poses with her book Orbital on the red carpet at the Booker Prize Award announcement ceremony, at the Old Billingsgate, in London, on Nov. 12.HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP/Getty Images
British author Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, which is set on the International Space Station and centres around the reflections of six astronauts as they circle the Earth in one 24-hour period.
Orbital was selected over five other finalists, including Held by Canadian author Anne Michaels, who has also been shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.
“I was not expecting that,” Ms. Harvey said in her acceptance speech on Tuesday. “We were told that we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes my speech. It was just one swear word 150 times.”
The Booker is open to any author who writes in English and is published in the U.K. or Ireland. Past winners have included Margaret Atwood – who has won it twice – A.S. Byatt, Salmon Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje.
This year’s shortlist included the largest number of women in the prize’s 55-year history. In addition to Ms. Harvey and Ms. Michaels, there were three other female finalists: American author Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake, Australian Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional and Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden for The Safekeep. American author Percival Everett also made the shortlist for his book James.
Orbital follows a day in the life of four astronauts, from the U.S., Japan, Britain and Italy, and two Russian cosmonauts as the space station speeds around the Earth 16 times. The two women and four men can’t help but wonder about what’s happening below; a typhoon bearing down on the Philippines, the death of an astronaut’s mother, the fragility of the planet.
“Harvey makes our world strange and new for us. She makes our wounded world something for contemplation, something deeply resonant,” said Edmund de Waal, who chaired the Booker Prize panel of five judges.
Mr. de Waal told a news conference on Tuesday that the panel’s decision was unanimous and it came at the end of a day of thoroughly reviewing each of the six books. “There was no voting involved,” he said. “This was looking each other in the eyes and having a very, very extraordinary day of reading and thinking together.”
At 136 pages, Orbital is the second-shortest Booker winner, just four pages longer than Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which won in 1979. Mr. de Waal said the length of the book had no bearing on the judges’ decision. “You can have huge books that you race through in no time at all, but you can have books like this which are also crystalline.”
He also said the judges weren’t trying to make a statement about environmental protection or other issues. “I’m not interested in books about issues. I’m interested in books that inhabit ideas through fiction,” he said.
While Orbital has already won wide acclaim, some critics have said readers might find the lack of a traditional plot and some of the existential musing ponderous at times.
Mr. de Waal pushed back and praised the writing as “remarkable.”
“People have talked about its lyricism, but I would like to point out its extraordinary acuity as well, the accuracy of this language and the brilliance of the construction of this novel,” he said.
Bookmakers had selected Mr. Everett’s James as the favourite but Orbital has been the biggest seller among the six finalists with 29,000 copies sold in the U.K. That compares with around 21,000 copies of James.
This is Ms. Harvey’s fifth novel, and her first, The Wilderness, made the Booker longlist in 2009.
She got the idea for Orbital after spending years looking at images of Earth from space. She told the Guardian in an interview last year that she wanted to “try to do justice in words to the beauty of the Earth and how I feel about the unnerving fact of its aloneness.”
Ms. Harvey, 49, nearly scrapped the book over fears that she wouldn’t get the story right. “I appreciate that authors are always writing about things they don’t know about, but this just felt like quite a leap to imagine myself into an astronaut’s position,” she told a news conference on Tuesday.
She re-opened her draft by accident during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 and decided to make another attempt. “So I thought, Okay, I’m going to try it. I just going to have to do it well enough to justify my right to write about something like space,” she added.
While she once worked at an astronomy museum in Bath, Ms. Harvey has acknowledged her limitations when it comes to technology. She has no social media presence and doesn’t own a cellphone. “I just don’t feel the need. I really enjoy being away from home and that’s it, no one can contact me. If I had one I’d be addicted to it,” she told the Times of London in a recent interview.
Ms. Harvey was presented with the Booker trophy and £50,000 in prize money, or $89,200, on Tuesday at a gala ceremony in London.
When asked how she planned to spend the prize money, Ms. Harvey said: on taxes, a new bike, and a trip to Japan. “I used to live there, so I’d love to go back there on a long trip.”
