By Alex Marshall
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.”
In her acceptance speech, Harvey said she wanted to dedicate the prize “to everybody who does speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life, and all the humans who speak for and call for and work for peace.”
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.
“Orbital” beat five other shortlisted titles. These include Percival Everett’s “James,” a retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of a Black man fleeing enslavement (which was British bookmakers’ favorite to win), and Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake,” about a spy infiltrating a group of environmental activists.
The other nominated titles were Anne Michaels’ “Held,” Yael van der Wouden’s “The Safekeep” and Charlotte Wood’s “Stone Yard Devotional.”
The Booker, which comes with a cash prize of 50,000 pounds, or $64,000, is awarded each year to the best novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland. Since 2014, when the prize became open to authors born outside Britain, Ireland, the Commonwealth and Zimbabwe, the Booker has gained a global following. Winning the prize leads to a jump in sales, and its winners regularly become literary sensations.
Last year, Paul Lynch won for “Prophet Song,” a novel that depicts Ireland descending into totalitarianism, followed by a civil war.
Reviewers in both Britain and the United States have praised “Orbital.” Joshua Ferris, in a review for The New York Times, said that although the novel is virtually plotless — instead featuring accounts of the astronauts’ daily tasks and pages of descriptions of what they see passing below — “sometimes, wonder and beauty suffice.”
During Thursday’s news conference, de Waal praised the novel for both its lyricism and acuity. In a typical sentence, Harvey describes astronauts watching Earth like “the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits.”
Harvey, 49, is the author of four previous novels, including “The Wilderness,” about a man with Alzheimer’s, which was longlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize, and 2018’s “The Western Wind,” about the mysterious death of a village’s wealthiest resident in medieval England. She also wrote “The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping,” a 2020 memoir about her struggles with insomnia.
Harvey has said that while writing the novel she continually watched streaming video from the International Space Station showing Earth from space.
“To look at the Earth from space was a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself,” she said during her acceptance speech.
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