British writer Samantha Harvey wins Booker Prize for fiction – Technologist

British writer Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for fiction on Tuesday, November 12, with Orbital, her short, wonder-filled novel set aboard the International Space Station. In this story she began writing during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, six astronauts are circling the Earth, looping through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over the course of a day.

Writer and artist Edmund de Waal, who chaired the five-member judging panel, called it a “miraculous novel” that “makes our world strange and new for us.” Gaby Wood, chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, noted that “in a year of geopolitical crisis, likely to be the warmest year in recorded history,” the winning book was “hopeful, timely and timeless.”

Harvey, who has written four previous novels and a memoir about insomnia, is the first British writer since 2020 to win the Booker. The prize is open to English-language 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 “capaciousness” of Harvey’s succinct novel – at 136 pages in its UK paperback edition, one of the shortest-ever Booker winners. “This is a book that repays slow reading,” he said. He said the judges spent a full day picking their winner and came to a unanimous conclusion. Harvey beat five other finalists from Canada, the United States, Australia, and the Netherlands, chosen from among 156 novels submitted by publishers.

‘No question of box-ticking’

American writer Percival Everett had been the bookies’ favorite to win with “James,” which reimagines Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of its main Black character, the enslaved man Jim.

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

Harvey is the first female Booker winner since 2019, though one of five women on this year’s shortlist, the largest number 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 box-ticking or of agendas or of anything else. It was simply about the novel,” he said before the awards ceremony at Old Billingsgate, a grand 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 UK or Ireland. Last year’s winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for post-democratic dystopia Prophet Song.