Samantha Harvey has been awarded the prestigious Booker Prize for 2024, the first woman to win the award in five years.
The English author received the prize at the Booker Prize ceremony in London on Tuesday night, local time, including 50,000 British pounds ($98,000 AUD), for her novel Orbital.
Harvey was included in a historic shortlist alongside four other women authors and one male author. Australian author Charlotte Wood was shortlisted for the prize, the first Australian female writer to be included on the Booker Prize shortlist.
The Booker Prize judges described Harvey’s 136-page novel, which was set in space, as providing “a vantage point we haven’t encountered in fiction before… infused with such awe and reverence that it reads like a love letter”.
Edmund de Waal, chair of the Booker Prize, described Orbital as “a book about a wounded world”.
Accepting the prize on Tuesday night, Harvey said her book is dedicated to “everyone who speaks for the Earth [and] for the dignity of other humans”.
“To look at the Earth from space is a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realising for the first time the person in the mirror is herself,” Harvey said.
“What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. What we do to life on Earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves.”
Harvey is the author of five novels. Her debut book, The Wilderness, was included on the Booker Prize longlist in 2009.
The English writer, who has always had a fascination with space, began working on Orbital during lockdown. Speaking on ABC RN’s The Book Show, Harvey said she wanted to create a “hybrid of nature writing about space — of looking at space as perhaps our one remaining wilderness — and also I wanted it to read like painting”.
Harvey is the first woman to win the Booker Prize since 2019, when the prize was awarded to both Margaret Atwood for The Testaments and Bernardine Evaristo with Girl, Woman, Other.
In 2014, the name of the prize changed from “Man Booker Prize” to “Booker Prize”, and expanded the eligibility rules to include authors of any nationality who have published an English-language novel in the UK and/or Ireland.
This year’s Booker shortlist iwas the largest contingent of female writers in the prize’s history — with five of the six authors being women. They include US novelist Rachel Kushner, British writer Samantha Harvey, Canadian author Anne Michaels and Dutch writer and teacher, Yael van der Wouden – the first Dutch author to make the shortlist.
You can read an extract of Orbital, published by The Booker Prize, here.
*Featured image: The Booker Prize