British novelist Samatha Harvey, 49, has won the prestigious Booker Prize with Orbital, acclaimed by critics as a "special pastoral" with an ecological message. "What we do to Earth, we do to ourselves," emphasized the author upon receiving the award for her fifth novel, which unfolds over 24 hours at the International Space Station, with its 16 sunsets and 16 sunrises.
Harvey prevailed in the final stretch over the American Percival Everett, author of James (a reinterpretation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from the slave's perspective) and four other women on the shortlist with a higher female participation in the 55-year history of the Booker.
Canadian Anne Michaels (The Embrace), Australian Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional), Dutch Yael Van Der Wouden (Safekeep), and American Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake) competed in an edition marked by the rise of eco-fiction.
Samantha Harvey herself emphasized upon receiving the award that her book's intention is to offer a view of Earth from space and achieve a "mirror effect" for us to recognize ourselves on the planet. The author made a call to the leaders gathered this week at COP29 in Baku to take the threat of climate change seriously.
Her book recreates the daily life of six astronauts orbiting the International Space Station, with a poetic and scientific prose in equal parts, interspersing reflections on Earth's fragility and mundane aspects of life in the spacecraft where everything must be reused or recycled.
This is the author's fifth novel, following her debut with The Wilderness (2009), written from the perspective of a man developing Alzheimer's. Harvey has also published a highly impactful essay, The Shapeless Unease, about her experience with insomnia. Her short stories have been published in Granta magazine and adapted for BBC radio.
The Booker Prize is endowed with 50,000 pounds (60,000 euros) but is considered the most prestigious award in English literature. Gaby Wood, executive director of the Booker Prize Foundation, highlighted Orbital as "a hopeful, timely, and timeless book in a year of geopolitical crisis, likely the warmest on record in history."