British writer Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize for fiction on Tuesday with Orbital, a short, wonder-filled novel set aboard the International Space Station, the AP reports. Harvey was awarded the $64,000 prize for what she has called a "space pastoral" about six astronauts circling the Earth, which she began writing during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. The confined characters loop through 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over the course of a day, trapped in one another's company and transfixed by the globe's fragile beauty.
"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 as she accepted the Booker trophy. "What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves." She dedicated the prize to "everybody who does speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life. All the people who speak for and call for and work for peace—this is for you." Founded in 1969, the Booker Prize is open to novels originally written in English published in the UK or Ireland, and has a reputation for transforming writers' careers. Last year's winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch for post-democratic dystopia Prophet Song.
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 and 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.
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