New Delhi: British writer Samantha Harvey won the prestigious Booker Prize on November 13 for her novel Orbital.
The book follows a team of astronauts in the International Space Station as they collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments, test the limits of the human body and observe. The book touches upon themes of mourning, humanity and the climate crisis.
‘Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen 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,” the Prize noted.
The Booker carries a $64,000 prize money and has been given since 1969.
Its past laureates include Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy.
Also read: Booker Prize 2024: Six Shortlisted Books, Reviewed
Orbital has been reported to be the second-shortest novel to win the prize at 136 pages. Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, winner of the 1979 prize, is the shortest.
Harvey had been longlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for The Wilderness in 2009, and now, for for Orbital. Harvey is also the author of the novels All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind, and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping.
She has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women’s Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize.
“I wanted to write a space pastoral,” she has told the official Booker Prize portal on her prize-winning novel.
She has no social media accounts and has admitted that she doesn’t own a mobile phone.
