Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker Prize
British writer Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize for her book Orbital.
“We were told that we were not allowed to swear in our speech, so there goes my speech. It’s just one swear word 150 times,” she said.
Samantha Harvey after winning the Booker Prize.Credit: Alberto Pezzali AP
Orbital is set on an international space station, over the course of 24 hours, and describes the thoughts of six astronauts and cosmonauts. It is Harvey’s fifth novel. She has also written a non-fiction book about insomnia.
The prize was announced at a ceremony in Old Billingsgate in London on Wednesday morning AEDT. Australian author Charlotte Wood was among six authors on the shortlist.
Wood was shortlisted for her highly acclaimed Stone Yard Devotional, which traces a woman’s rejection of the modern world for a life of service, contemplation and devotion in a rural nunnery in NSW.
American Rachel Kushner was nominated for Creation Lake and fellow American Percival Everett for James - a reimagining of Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Also shortlisted were Canadian writer Anne Michaels for Held and Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch author nominated, for her debut novel The Safekeep.
Charlotte Wood, the first Australian to be nominated for the award in a decade.Credit: Getty Images
“It’s fair to say that no Booker speech has ever been made in a perfect world,” Harvey said on accepting the award, “but it’s hard to not acknowledge the imperfections of the world that we live in today.
“We are, as Carl Sagan says in his book Cosmos, ‘the local embodiment of a consciousness grown to self-awareness, we are star stuff pondering the stars’. And I would add we are earth stuff pondering the earth and I think my novel is an exercise in that pondering.
“To look at the earth from space is a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realising for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself.
“What we do to life on earth, we do to ourselves,” she said.
Shortlisted authors (from left) Yael van der Wouden, Rachel Kushner, Anne Michaels, with Queen Camilla, Charlotte Wood, Percival Everett and Samantha Harvey during a reception for The Booker Prize Foundation at Clarence House.Credit: Getty Images
Each of the novels shortlisted involve meditations on exile, identity and belonging, according to the judges, and “the gravitational forces exerted on us by the places we call home”.
No Australian woman has ever won the Booker. Past Australian winners include Thomas Keneally, Richard Flanagan, Peter Carey (twice), D.B.C. Pierre and Australian-raised Aravind Adiga.
This year’s judging panel included artist and author Edmund de Waal; award-winning novelist Sara Collins; the fiction editor of The Guardian, Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.
De Waal said the final six books represent “storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity”.
The shortlisted books were selected from 156 works published between October 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024, and submitted to the prize by publishers. Each publisher can select only one work for nomination.
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