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British author Samantha Harvey has won this year’s Booker Prize for her work of fiction that is based on the experiences of six cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station.
“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,” judging chair, a renowned artist and author Edmund de Waal was quoted.
Meanwhile, Harvey expressed her amazement at being the recipient of the coveted literary award.
“I was not expecting that,” said Harvey in her acceptance speech. “We were told that we weren’t allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes my speech. It was just one swear word 150 times,” she said.
With the entire novel lasting 136 pages, Orbital is the second-shortest work to win the Booker prize and it is found to be four pages longer than ‘Offshore’ by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won the prize in 1979.
When questioned about whether the panel’s choice is a subtle encouragement for short books, De Waal rejected the notion — “Absolutely not.. Orbital is the right length of book for what it’s trying to achieve.”
Talking about the struggle of authoring her piece, Harvey revealed that at one point, she had quit the idea before it reached fruition.
“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,” she said.
She also claimed that Tim Peake, an astronaut, has read the book, and was ‘very nice about it’.
Harvey was previously nominated for the Booker prize in 2009 for her debut novel, The Wilderness. Orbital is her fifth novel, following All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind.
She has also authored a memoir on insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, which was published in 2020.