Brit Samantha Harvey wins prestigious Booker literary prize

Writer Samantha Harvey has won this year’s British Booker literary prize. The 49-year-old Brit was honored on Tuesday for her fifth novel, Orbital, which follows two men and four women from Japan, Russia, the United States, Britain and Italy aboard the International Space Station and is about grief, desire and the climate crisis.

Harvey dedicated the prestigious award to “all the people who speak for and not against the Earth and work for and not against peace.”

Jury chairman Edmund de Waal said that “everyone and no one is the subject” of the novel, in which “six astronauts orbit the Earth in the International Space Station, observing the transitions of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones.” “With her language full of lyricism and poignancy, Harvey makes our world strange and new to us,” he continued.

Harvey had already been nominated for the English Language Literature Prize in 2019 for her novel “The Wilderness”.

This year, five women were candidates for the award, the winner of which will receive prize money equivalent to around 60,000 euros. Previous winners include Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood.