The novel Orbital tells about the astronauts’ stay on the International Space Station, for which the English writer Samantha Harvey won the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction this Tuesday night.
The book tells about 24 hours on board the space station. In addition to the usual tasks and duties of the six astronauts, two men and four women, it also follows their observations. “Looking at the Earth from space is like when a child looks in the mirror for the first time and realizes that he sees himself. What we do to the Earth, we do for ourselves,” said the AP group the author, who read the testimonies of real astronauts or look at pictures from cameras located on the International Space Station.
She began her fifth novel at the age of forty-nine Samantha Harveythat none of their works have yet appeared in Czech translation, for writing during the curfew during the coronavirus pandemic. He calls it “pastoral space”. A pastoral is a literary or musical unit drawing on rural life as a subject.
The writer says that she almost gave up on the project at one point. “I thought to myself: why on earth would anyone want to read about a place from a woman who writes about it from her desk in Wiltshire and imagines what it must be like when people really been there? I was losing my temper, I said I don’t think I have the right to write this book,” she said. Later the manuscript was read by, for example, the -former British astronaut Tim Peake, who spent half a year on the International Space Station in 2015. He is said to have recommended the book.
according to the Guardian newspaper At just 136 pages, Orbital is the second shortest book ever to win the Booker Prize. There is a prize of 50,000 pounds associated with it, which translates to about 1.5 million kroner. Samantha Harvey was the first Englishman to win it since 2019. She beat five finalists from Canada, the United States, Australia and the Netherlands, who were chosen by the jury from 156 novels submitted publishers in.
Booker Prize awarded since 1969, it is open to English-language novels published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Previous recipients include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood, among others.
