Samantha Harvey’s space station novel ‘Orbital’ wins Booker Prize

British author Samantha Harvey has won this year’s Booker Prize for her novel Orbital that explores life aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Just 136 pages-long, Orbital is one of the shortest novels to have won the prestigious Booker Prize.

Harvey wrote Orbital during the Covid-19 lockdowns and captured the perspective of six international astronauts confined in space, where they witness 16 sunrises and sunsets over a single 24-hour period.

Since its release last November, Orbital has sold about 29,000 copies, surpassing the combined sales of the past three Booker winners.

“To look at the Earth from space is like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself,” Harvey said, adding that she drew inspiration for the novel from ISS footage and astronaut memoirs, portraying Earth as both beautiful and fragile from afar. The theme of the novel resonated deeply with readers.

Judges of the Booker Prize praised Orbital for its “intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world”, and applauded Harvey’s language for making “our world strange and new for us.”

With Orbital’s win, Harvey has joined the ranks of Booker celebrities like Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Yann Martel. She walked away with a prize of £50,000 (Rs 51.41 lakh) after beating finalists from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the US.

Orbital was selected as the winner over titles like Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner and Held by Canadian author Anne Michaels.

Other contenders included Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional; The Safekeep by Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden; and The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Percival Everett.