English author Samantha Harvey’s fifth novel, Orbital, was announced the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize on Tuesday.
First awarded in 1969, the Booker is recognised as the leading prize for quality literary fiction written in English.
Harvey was one of five female writers on the shortlist (of six titles) — the highest number of women in the prize’s 55-year history — and is the first woman to be awarded the prize since 2019, when the award was shared between Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood for The Testaments.
As per The Booker Prize’s website, Harvey’s novel takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station. Compact yet beautifully expansive, Orbital invites us to observe our planet's splendour while reflecting on the value of every human life.
“I thought of it as space pastoral — a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space,” said Harvey of penning her intergalactic novel — the first title set in space to be awarded the Booker Prize, nogal (an astronomical literary feat!)
Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, described the winner as “... a novel propelled by the beauty of 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us ... [Orbital] reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.”
Click here to read an extract from Harvey’s acclaimed celestial novel.
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