Booker Prize Is Awarded to Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’

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.”