British Samantha Harvey wins the Booker Prize for fiction

LondonBritish writer Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for fiction on Tuesday with Orbitala short, wonder-filled novel set aboard the International Space Station.

Harvey received the prize worth 50,000 pounds ($64,000) for what he called a “space pastoral” about six astronauts orbiting the Earth, which he began writing during the confinements of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Characters who are also confined experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over the course of a day, trapped in the company of others and captivated by the fragile beauty of the planet.

Writer and artist Edmund de Waal, who chaired the five-member jury panel, called it a “miraculous novel” that “makes our world strange and new to us.”

Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that “in a year of geopolitical crisis, probably the warmest in recorded history”, the winning book was “hopeful, timely and timeless”.

Harvey, who has written four novels and a memoir about insomnia, is the first British writer since 2020 to win the Booker. The prize is open to English-speaking writers of any nationality and has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Previous winners include Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel.

De Waal praised the “crystalline” writing and “breadth” of Harvey’s succinct novel, which at 136 pages in its UK paperback edition, is one of the shortest Booker winners.

“This is a book that rewards slow reading,” he said.

He mentioned that the judges spent a full day choosing their winner and came to a unanimous conclusion. Harvey beat out five other finalists from Canada, the United States, Australia and the Netherlands, chosen from 156 novels submitted by the editors.

American writer Percival Everett had been the bookmakers’ favorite to win with Jameswhich poses Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain from the point of view of his main black character, the enslaved man Jim.

The other finalists were the American writer Rachel Kushner with her spy story Creation Lake; the poetic novel Held by the Canadian Anne Michaels; the australian saga Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood; and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch author to be a finalist for the Booker.

Harvey is the first female Booker winner since 2019, although one of five women on this year’s shortlist, the most in the prize’s 55-year history. De Waal said issues such as the gender or nationality of the authors were “background noise” that did not influence the judges.

“There was absolutely no question of meeting quotas or agendas or anything else. It was just about the novel,” he said before the awards ceremony at Old Billingsgate, a former Victorian fish market in central London.

Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to novels originally written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Last year’s winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for post-democratic dystopia Prophet Song.