Everything you need to know about Orbital by Samantha Harvey, winner of the Booker Prize 2024
As Samantha Harvey becomes the first woman since 2019 to win the Booker Prize, here’s the lowdown on her winning novel, Orbital
Why did Orbital win the Booker Prize 2024?
Edmund de Waal, Chair of judges, said:
‘In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world. Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. We wanted everything.
‘Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the Earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.
‘All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. 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.’
Samantha Harvey, centre, with Booker Prize 2024 judges Sara Collins, Yiyun Li, Edmund de Waal, Nitin Sawhney and Justine Jordan
© David Parry for the Booker Prize FoundationWhat is Orbital about?
Six astronauts and cosmonauts – from America, Russia, Italy, the UK and Japan – rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?
Together, as they travel at speeds of over 17,000 miles per hour, they watch their silent blue planet, circling it 16 times in a single day, spinning past continents, and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans.
We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude.
Yet although separated from the world, they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it.
Orbital is one of only a handful of novels set in space to have been nominated for the Booker Prize over the years, and is the first space-set winner. At 136 pages, it is one of the shortest ever Booker Prize winners, though not quite as short as Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, winner of the 1979 prize.
Who is Samantha Harvey?
Born in Kent in 1975, the daughter of a builder, Samantha Harvey studied philosophy at the University of York and University of Sheffield. A writer and sculptor, in the 2000s, she worked at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath, the site from which the planet Uranus was discovered. She is now a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and the author of five novels.
She was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009 for her debut novel The Wilderness, about an ageing architect who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. The book was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. Harvey, whose writing has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf, is known for the enormous variety of her novels’ settings (in 2017, she told The Bookseller: ‘I try to do something formally different with each novel’). Prior to Orbital, her previous novel, The Western Wind, was about a priest in 15th century Somerset. In 2020 Harvey published her first book of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, about her personal experience of chronic insomnia.
She has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women’s Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Telegraph and TIME magazine.
Although her latest book is set in the hi-tech world of the International Space Station, Harvey herself lives a fairly low-tech life. She has no social media accounts and has admitted that she doesn’t own a mobile phone.
The only British writer on the Booker Prize 2024 shortlist, Harvey is also the first woman to win the prize since 2019, when it was shared by Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood.
Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital, attends the Booker Prize 2024 event at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in London
©️David Parry for the Booker Prize FoundationHow does the book begin?
The opening paragraph reads:
Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.
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What else did the Booker judges say about the book?
‘Samantha Harvey’s compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.
‘By positioning the entire planet within a single narrative frame, Orbital blurs distinctions between borders, time zones and our own individual stories. This is a vantage point we haven’t encountered in fiction before, and it is infused with such awe and reverence that it reads like an act of worship.
‘In offering us a vision of our planet as borderless and interlinked, Harvey makes the case for the futility of territorial conflicts, and the need for co-operation and respect for our shared humanity. This is a theme that couldn’t be more sobering, timely, or urgent.’
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
What have the critics said?
James Wood, The New Yorker:
‘Samantha Harvey, one of the most consistently surprising contemporary British novelists, becomes something like the cosmic artificer of our era with her slim, enormous novel Orbital, which imaginatively constructs the day-to-day lives of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Orbital is the strangest and most magical of projects, not least because it’s barely what most people would call a novel, but performs the kind of task that only a novel could dare.’
Wendy Smith, Boston Globe:
‘Samantha Harvey’s meditative novel portraying life aboard a spacecraft contains on almost every page sentences so gorgeous that you want to put down the book in awe. In the first two paragraphs, which introduce us to six sleeping astronauts, we find: “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it is stalking through their quarters”; and, “Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backwards as they forge towards its edgeless edge.” There are no big personal conflicts in Orbital and only two notable events, which both take place below them on Earth, but the sense of wonder and delight conveyed by Harvey’s elegant prose and philosophical musings makes this a deeply pleasurable book for serious fiction lovers.’
Alexandra Harris, The Guardian:
‘With this slender and stretchy fifth novel, Harvey makes an ecstatic voyage with an imagined crew on the International Space Station, and looks back to Earth with a lover’s eye. Orbital goes into flight for a single day, though a day is a different kind of thing up here, where “the whipcrack of morning arrives every ninety minutes” and the sun is “up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy”. It’s a nicely giddying structural ploy to align each chapter with an orbit of the Earth: 16 orbits all together. The mobile narrative sends out probes into past and future, but all is held in the looping motion of elliptical travel.’
Susie Mesure, iNews:
‘Harvey blends prose of poetic beauty (“over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning – a slender molten breach of light”) with a clarion call to take responsibility for where we live. “Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?”’
What has Samantha Harvey said about Orbital?
‘I wanted to write about our human occupation of low Earth orbit for the last quarter of a century – not as sci-fi but as realism. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.’
Read the interview on the Booker Prizes website.
‘Insomnia did seem to feed into writing about how orbiting Earth 16 times a day explodes any sense of time. I’ve always been interested in time as a thing in which we live, and what the elastic form of the novel can do with it. Having insomnia so severely for such a long time has definitely changed how I think and work. Orbital is shorter and more fragmented and restless than my other novels. That’s just how I write now – more quickly, intensely, impressionistically.’
Read the interview in the Guardian.
How did Samantha Harvey research Orbital?
Most of the book was written during COVID lockdowns, during which Harvey watched many hours of online footage from the International Space Station. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme, Harvey said: ‘I would have footage of the Earth in low Earth orbit on my desktop all the time as I wrote. It was my main reference point. It felt such a beautiful liberation to be able to do that every day, and at the same time I was writing about six people trapped in a tin can. It felt like there was something resonant about that and our experience of lockdown, of not being able to escape each other, and also not being able to get to other people.’
Did the book almost not happen?
Yes. Harvey told Front Row that she wrote a few thousand words of the book before lockdown, but then lost her nerve and set it aside. She said: ‘I’ve never been in space, I could never go to space, and there are humans who’ve been to space who write very lucidly about it, so who am I to do this? I had a crisis of confidence and felt I was trespassing. So I gave up.’ Eventually she came back to her initial draft and felt that ‘it had an energy and some sort of pulse to it that I connected with straight away. So I thought, “I’m going to do it”. I just had to do it well enough.’
Winner The Booker Prize 2024
- By
- Samantha Harvey
- Published by
- Jonathan Cape
Orbital is the winner of the Booker Prize 2024. Six astronauts rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?
