Samantha Harveys Orbital Wins Booker Prize

When Samantha Harvey started work on “Orbital,” a novel set aboard the International Space Station, she wrote 5,000 words then, suddenly, lost her nerve.“I thought, ‘Well, I have never been to space.I could never go to space,’” Harvey recalled in a recent BBC radio interview: “‘Who am I to do this?’”She only returned to the novel during the pandemic, after realizing she should stop worrying about “trespassing in space,” she said.

Years later, that decision has paid off.On Tuesday, “Orbital” won the Booker Prize, the prestigious literary award.Edmund de Waal, an artist and the chair of this year’s panel of judges, called “Orbital” a “beautiful, miraculous novel” in a news conference before Tuesday’s announcement.

The book centers on astronauts and cosmonauts who circle the earth, observing 16 sunrises and sunsets, and witnessing weather pass across fragile borders and time zones.“Harvey makes our world strange and new for us,” de Waal said, adding that Harvey’s writing transformed the earth into “something for contemplation, something deeply resonant.”Harvey is the first female author to win the Booker since 2019, when Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” and Bernardine Evaristo’s “Girl, Woman, Other” shared the award.At 136 pages, it is also the second-shortest novel to win since the prize’s founding in 1969.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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