London: British author Samantha Harvey has won this year's prestigious Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, inspired by her lifelong fascination with outer space. "It seems a slightly eccentric choice because I didn't know anything about space but I've always been interested in it," said Harvey in an interview on Thursday.
The 49-year-old author, who admits to having no specialist knowledge of space, was instead inspired by live video feeds from the International Space Station (ISS). "You can sort of travel with the astronauts around the Earth," Harvey said. "That's what I did for years, I just travelled around each day."
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A short but powerful novel
At just 136 pages, Orbital is the second-shortest novel ever to win the Booker Prize. The story covers a brief but intense 24-hour period, during which astronauts aboard the ISS witness 16 sunrises as they orbit the Earth. The novel explores profound themes such as mourning, desire, and the climate crisis.
A personal connection to climate change
Though Harvey didn’t set out to address climate change in the book, she acknowledged the importance of the issue, especially as the UN climate change conference was being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the time of her win. She noted the growing concern for space as a resource and how it ties into global environmental issues.
"We are exploiting and trashing space in the same way we have exploited and trashed this planet," she said but denied adopting a prescriptive approach to readers. "My responsibility to the book is an aesthetic one," she went on.
"And if it were to have an impact that were positive, that could contribute towards changes in whatever tiny way, then I would be absolutely delighted. But I think that's something that's entirely beyond my remit."
Written during the pandemic
Orbital was partially written during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. At the time, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had not yet occurred, but Harvey observed that the once-promising collaboration between American, European, and Russian astronauts aboard the ISS was starting to show signs of strain.
But Harvey said it was "very evident" that the ISS "peace project" regrouping American, European and Russian astronauts was becoming "very strained". "We know that the ISS is going to be de-orbited in a few years," she said.
"I definitely did want to write about that, because it felt like there was a something very poignant about the fact that this rather beautiful symbol of peace and cooperation, sort of post-Cold War cooperation, is really collapsing, or has now collapsed."
A moment of triumph
Harvey’s debut novel, The Wilderness (2009), was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and now, with Orbital, she has reached the pinnacle of literary achievement. Since winning, Harvey admitted to being on a high and said she is still struggling to anticipate what her Booker Prize win will mean for her future work.
"There's no greater validation of a career, of someone's work, than this prize," she said. "So, I want to take all the confidence and courage that I can from that... without too much sense of pressure from the outside."
She insisted: "I think this novel is really more about the Earth than it is about space itself. "It allowed me to write about time, the upending of time, the strange experience of time, that is something I think I've been interested in all of my novels."
A historic year for women authors
This year, five out of the six Booker Prize finalists were women, including Rachel Kushner, Anne Michaels, Charlotte Wood, Yael van der Wouden, and Harvey. She becomes the first female author to win the prize since Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo shared it in 2019.
"This is about change that has been taking place in the industry for the last two or three decades," Harvey said of female representation. "This change is now manifesting, is actually bearing out, and I think we should all be really delighted about that. I certainly am."
The chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, described Orbital as "a book about a wounded world" and said he and his colleagues unanimously praised its "beauty and ambition".
AFP
Published: 15 Nov 2024, 03:46 pm IST
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