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 (US$64,000) prize for what she has called a “space pastoral” about six astronauts circling the Earth, which she began writing during Covid-19 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 realising 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”.
