UK writer Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize with space novel

I was not expecting that,

Harvey said upon learning of her win, the first by a woman since Atwood was recognised in 2019 for "The Testaments" alongside Bernardine Evaristo for "Girl, Woman, Other".

With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us,

he added

There was absolutely no question of box ticking or of agendas or of anything else. It was simply about the novel,

he said before the awards ceremony at Old Billingsgate, a grand former Victorian fish market in central London

All the people who speak for and call for and work for peace – this is for you,

she said

To look at the Earth from space is like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself,

said Harvey, who researched her novel by reading books by astronauts and watching the space station's live camera

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,

de Waal said

I wrote a few thousand words, I think, and I lost my nerve, I guess,

Harvey said in an interview with the BBC radio programme Front Row earlier this month

Orbital wins the prize in a year of geopolitical crisis, likely to be the warmest year in recorded history

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said

Edmund de Waalartist

I don’t think fiction has a practical impact. I’m not interested in books about issues,

said De Waal

It was my main reference point,

she said in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme

I’ve never been in space, I could never go to space, and there are humans who’ve been to space who write very lucidly about it, so who am I to do this?”

she said

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

said De Waal

I 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 ... I thought of it as space pastoral – a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space, with a slightly nostalgic sense of what’s disappearing.”

Harvey, a creative writing tutor, at Bath Spa University, said

I would have footage of the Earth in low Earth orbit on my desktop all the time as I wrote. It was my main reference point. It felt such a beautiful liberation to be able to do that every day, and at the same time I was writing about six people trapped in a tin can. It felt like there was something resonant about that and our experience of lockdown, of not being able to escape each other and also not being able to get to other people.”

She described writing a novel set in space during successive lockdowns