Booker Prize 2024: Samantha Harvey’s space station novel ‘Orbital’ wins annual literary prize

London
AP
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British author Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for fiction on Tuesday 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 contained characters go through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in the course of a day, trapped in each other’s company and confused by the globe’s ever-changing vistas.

“Looking at Earth from space is like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is himself,” said Harvey, who researched his 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 implicit in the view of Earth is the fact of human-caused climate change.”

She dedicated the award to everyone who speaks “for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other people, other life.”

“All the people who advocate and call for and work for peace – this is for you,” she said.

Author and artist Edmund de Waal, who chaired the five-member judging panel, called “Orbital” a “miraculous novel” that “makes our world strange and new to us.”

Gaby Wood, executive director of the Booker Prize Foundation, noted that “in a year of geopolitical crisis, probably the hottest 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 author 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. Past winners include Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel.

De Waal praised the “crystalline” writing and “capacity” of Harvey’s concise novel – at 136 pages in the UK paperback edition, one of the shortest Booker winners ever.

“This is a book that rewards slow reading,” he said.

He said the judges spent a full day choosing their winner and came to a unanimous conclusion. Harvey beat out five other finalists from Canada, the United States, Australia and the Netherlands, chosen from 156 novels submitted by publishers.

American author Percival Everett had been the bookies’ favorite to win with “James”, which recreates Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” from the point of view of its black main character, enslaved man Jim.

The other finalists were American author Rachel Kushner’s spy story “Creation Lake”; Canadian Anne Michaels’ poetic novel “Luck”; Charlotte Wood’s Australian saga “Stone Yard Devotional”; and “The Safekeep” by Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted for the Booker.

Harvey is the first female Booker winner since 2019, although 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 authors’ gender or nationality were “background noise” that did not influence the judges.

“There was absolutely no question of ticking boxes or agendas or anything else. It was simply about the novel,” he said before the awards ceremony in Old Billingsgate, a grand former Victorian fish market in central London.

The Booker Prize was founded in 1969 and is open to novels originally written in English, published in Great Britain or Ireland. Last year’s winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for post-democratic dystopia “Prophet Song”.

Lynch presented Harvey with her Booker trophy at the ceremony and warned her that her life was about to change dramatically because of the Booker publicity.

Harvey said she was “overwhelmed” but remained down-to-earth about spending her prize money.

She said she would pay “some of it in taxes. I want to buy a new bike. And then the rest – I want to go to Japan.”