English author Samantha Harvey wins Booker Prize 2024 for her novel set in space, Orbital
Orbital is Samantha Harvey's fifth novel. Her last novel The Western Wind was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 euros. (Supplied: Booker Prize Foundation)
English author Samantha Harvey has won the prestigious Booker Prize, worth 50,000 British pounds ($98,000), for her novel, Orbital, about a team of six astronauts on board the International Space Station.
The author was longlisted in 2009 for her debut novel about dementia The Wilderness. This year, she bested Charlotte Wood, the first Australian to be shortlisted for the Booker since 2014, American authors Rachel Kushner and Percival Everett (who are both two-time finalists), Canadian writer Anne Michaels and Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch author to ever be shortlisted.
Chair of the Booker Prize judges Edmund de Waal announced Harvey as the winner at a ceremony in London on Tuesday night, UK time, and has described the novel — which is only 144 pages long — as "a book about a wounded world".
Harvey dedicated the prize to "everyone who speaks for the Earth [and] for the dignity of other humans".
"To look at the Earth from space is a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realising for the first time the person in the mirror is herself.
"What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. What we do to life on Earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves."
In their report, the judges celebrated Orbital as "provid[ing] a vantage point we haven't encountered in fiction before" and being "infused with such awe and reverence that it reads like a love letter".
Harvey says she sees similarities between Orbital and Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel, The Waves. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)
"[I]t offers us a vision of our planet as borderless and interlinked, and makes the case for co-operation and respect for our shared humanity."
The book was chosen unanimously by the judges, in recognition of "its beauty and ambition", and its "capaciousness and resonance".
This year's Booker Prize shortlist was the first to feature five out of six novels by women, but the favourite to win was Percival Everett with his subversion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James.
With her win, Harvey becomes the first woman winner of the prize since 2019, when Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo shared the prize, and the first British winner since 2020, when the prize went to Scottish writer Douglas Stuart.
Prize chair de Waal described this year's shortlist as "storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity". (Supplied: Booker Prize Foundation)
A fascination with space
Harvey — the author of five novels — has long been fascinated by space. As a teenager, she would go to the library to collect quotes from astronauts.
In particular, she recalls Alexei Leonov, a Soviet cosmonaut, saying: "I believe I never knew what the word 'round' meant until I saw the Earth from space."
As she grew older she would look at images of the Earth from space, including those taken by a live camera in the International Space Station (ISS), which is roughly the size of a football field.
The International Space Station is due to be de-orbited in 2030 after 32 years in operation. (Pictured: The view from the ISS in 2022, 425 kilometres above the Coral Sea, north-east of Australia.) (Supplied: NASA)
It was during lockdown that she started working seriously on Orbital, with footage of a low orbit of the Earth on her desktop as she wrote. But as she told the Booker Prize, she didn't want to write a sci-fi novel, but instead a kind of "space pastoral" that feels realistic.
Speaking to ABC RN's The Book Show, Harvey says: "I can trace a path back. I think, 'Oh yeah, of course that book was maybe always lurking there in me.'
"But maybe the thing that was inevitable about it in my writing was this sense of wanting to write about beauty, about rapture, about joy, wanting to write a narrative that didn't depend upon dramatic conflict, that was interested in other things, in propelling the reader in other ways."
With Orbital, Harvey says she wanted to create a "hybrid of nature writing about space — of looking at space as perhaps our one remaining wilderness — and also I wanted it to read like painting".
"I wanted it to have a painterly feel to it, slightly pastoral, writing that was about images and about the visual world, and to see if words might be equal to that task."
It takes about 90 minutes for the ISS — which travels at about 28,000 kilometres per hour — to orbit Earth, according to NASA. That means over the course of a day, it makes 16 orbits around Earth and sees 16 sunrises and sunsets.
In Orbital, the ISS travels low above the planet over the course of a day, as the astronauts — from America, Japan, the UK, Italy nd Russia — observe the changing landscapes and seasons, including glaciers, deserts and a typhoon, collect meteorological data and conduct experiments. But the realities of their lives back at home intrude upon their work.
That sense of depth and time gives the novel a domestic feel, which also draws upon Harvey's experience of severe insomnia. It could be described as lacking plot, but reveals something deeper about how humans live day-to-day.
"I wanted to write about the eventless repetition of that livelihood," Harvey says. "On one hand, nothing is happening, and on the other hand, everything is happening. There's nothing to do and there's everything to do.
"What is it to just be going around the planet repetitively, really repetitively doing the same tasks every day, repetitively eating the same food every day with the same people, and yet for every single day to be extraordinary and indescribable?
"That seemed to me a unique and fascinating project that'd be difficult to replicate on Earth."