Samantha Harvey’s fifth novel, ‘Orbital’, captures Earth’s grandeur and fragility as seen from space; Booker judges call it a ‘small, strange, beautiful and mighty’ book about a ‘wounded world’
British writer Samantha Harvey (49), one of the five women and the only one from Britain on the shortlist, has won the 2024 Booker Prize, for her ingenious fifth novel Orbital (Penguin Random House) that imagines what it’s like to be in space. The jury termed the novel to be “a book about a wounded world” and “small, strange, beautiful and mighty”. The award was announced in London on Tuesday (November 12) night. The novel follows six astronauts over the course of 24 hours as they orbit the Earth on their nine-month space mission. Harvey’s astronauts are from the US, Russia, Italy, Britain and Japan. Harvey, a creative writing tutor at Bath Spa University, beat five other finalists — Anne Michaels (Held), Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake), Yael van der Wouden (The Safekeep), Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional) and Percival Everett (James) — for the 50,000 pounds prize.
“In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world. Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written 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,” Edmund de Waal, chair of the judges, said.
‘What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves’
“All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share,” added Waal, British ceramicist and author known for his large-scale as well as minimalist installations of porcelain vessels that explore themes of diaspora, memory, and materiality.
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In her acceptance speech, Harvey reflected on the themes of her book and “the imperfections of the world that we live in today.” She said: “We are, as Carl Sagan says in his book Cosmos, ‘the local embodiment of a consciousness grown to self-awareness. We are star-stuff pondering the stars.’ I would add that we are also Earth-stuff pondering the Earth, and I think my novel is an exercise in that pondering. To look at the Earth from space is a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realising for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself. What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves, and what we do to life on Earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves.” Harvey dedicated the prize to “everybody who does speak for and not against the earth.”
“Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters. They hang in their sleeping bags. A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities,” reads the opening sentence of the novel.
Earlier, in an interview to the Booker Prize Foundation, Harvey said that she “wanted to write about our human occupation of low earth orbit for the last quarter of a century — not as sci-fi but as realism. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.” In the novel, the six astronauts — Chie, Roman, Shaun, Pietro, Nell, Anton — aboard the International Space Station — “contemplate Earth and reflect on life’s fragility and our interdependence.”
‘Astronauts the novel’s heartbeat, not the lens’
“I’ve been looking at images of Earth from space for years. There’s a live camera from the ISS – you can watch the astronauts do spacewalks. Doing multiple orbits of Earth for months online made me want to try to do justice in words to the beauty of the Earth and how I feel about the unnerving fact of its aloneness — could I do justice to that in the way an image can? I put astronauts in it because the novel needed a heartbeat, but they’re just part of the image, not the lens,” Harvey told Anthony Cummins in an interview in The Guardian.
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In the days leading up to the announcement of the prize, the British oddmakers had declared Harvey and Percival Everett, the only man on the shortlist whose 2001 novel inspired American Fiction, one of the finest films on racism in recent years, to be the most likely winners. James (Pan Macmillan), the latest novel by Everett, who was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022 for The Trees, is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. It recently won the Kirkus Prize for fiction and is also a finalist for this year’s National Book Award. Harvey was longlisted for the Booker prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness.
Orbital, which runs into 136 pages, is the second-shortest book to win the prize in the history of Booker Prize; it is four pages longer than Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, which won the prize in 1979. Refuting that the panel’s choice is a vote in favour of short books, De Waal said that Orbital is “the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve”. Harvey, who wrote Orbital during the lockdown, said that she nearly gave up on writing the novel because she thought: “Why on earth would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space, imagining what it’s like being in space, when people have actually been there? I lost my nerve with it, I thought, I don’t have the authority to write this book.”
Incidentally, this year marked the first time that five women were shortlisted in the prize’s 55-year history. Harvey has become the first woman to win the award in five years. Asked what she would spend the prize money on, Harvey, whose other novels include All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind (she has also written a memoir on insomnia called The Shapeless Unease, which was published in 2020), said that she needs a new bike. Orbital has also won this year’s Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature; it was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. When last year’s winner, Paul Lynch, handed over the trophy to Harvey, she said: “I was not expecting that. We were told that we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech. So there goes my speech.”
