LONDON (AP) — 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. Harvey was awarded the 50,000-pound ($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.
Writer and artist Edmund de Waal, who chaired the five-member judging panel, called it a “miraculous novel” that “makes our world strange and new for us.” 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.
The prize is open to English-language writers of any nationality and has a reputation for transforming writers’ careers. Previous winners include Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hilary Mantel. De Waal praised the “crystalline” writing and “capaciousness” of Harvey’s succinct novel – at 136 pages in its U.
K. paperback edition, one of the shortest-ever Booker winners. “This is a book that repays s.