The Booker Prize 2024
News
BSU lecturer recognised in Booker Prize longlist
Monday, 12 August, 2024Bath Spa University’s Reader in English and Creative Writing, Samantha Harvey, has been longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize for the second time since 2009.
Considered one of the UK’s ‘most exquisite stylists’ by The Guardian, Sam has garnered the attention of Booker Prize 2024 judges for her latest novel, Orbital.
The book follows a day in the life of six astronauts as they voyage around the Earth on a space station, combining an urgent appeal about the state of our planet and humanity. The reader glimpses moments of their lives on earth through brief communications with their families, photographs, and treasured talismans, and watches as they observe and record Earth.
Describing Orbital, the 2024 Booker Prize judges said:
“Six astronauts observe Earth’s splendour while navigating bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Compact yet beautifully expansive, this is a love letter to our planet.”
Published in 2024, Orbital is Sam’s latest work of fiction and has made a significant splash in the world of literature; it was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and is currently sitting on both the longlist for the Booker Prize 2024 and the shortlist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2024.
Widely considered the UK’s most prestigious award for fiction, the Booker Prize has set the standard for exceptional works of literature for more than 50 years. Describing how she felt after discovering she’d been longlisted, Sam said:
“I felt astonished, and then, for a day or two, ‘Oh wow, that’s nice’. Then, gradually, happy, a simple happiness that has grown and grown since. We all know prize-lists are a bit of a lottery, and it’s excellent to win the lottery. I’m just happy.”
After starting the novel in 2019, Sam described ‘losing her nerve’ and setting her sights on ideas that felt more accessible. She said:
“I wrote about 5000 words and then abandoned it because I lost my nerve. Orbital is set in space but it’s realism, not sci-fi; it’s about a single day in low earth orbit. As such, I had a feeling I’ve never had before when writing fiction, one of transgression – who am I to write about this from imagination when there are astronauts who can and do write from experience?”
Then, a stroke of luck found her recommitted to the project:
“One day, by chance (I opened the wrong document) I found myself reading those 5000 words and they felt alive and energetic to me and that was it.”
Over two years, Sam wrote three drafts from three different perspectives and watched the novel undergo significant change in style and structure, but never in proposition.
“Its core was always the expression of beauty, joy, the capacity to be amazed.”
Sam completed an MA in Creative Writing at BSU in 2004 and described the experience as inspiring a feeling of ‘absolute rightness’. She said:
“I got my agent as a result of it. Some of my dearest friends are people I met on that course - I’ve just been on a writing weekend with some of them. It was the pivot point of my life; it enabled everything – slowly, but surely - to change.”
Shortly after completing her Master’s degree, Sam moved on to a PhD at BSU, took up a teaching post on the MA, and later as a PhD supervisor. Her novel The Wilderness has roots in her MA manuscript, and All is Song in her PhD thesis.
Discussing her time at BSU, she said:
“I can’t express fully how much it underpinned everything that’s gone on to happen in my writing life.”
Sam is the author of five novels and a work of non-fiction, All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind, Orbital, and The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping.
Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the HWA Gold Crown Award.
Sam has won the Staunch Book Prize for The Western Wind and taken home the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize for The Wilderness.
The Booker Prize 2024 will announce its shortlist on 16 September 2024 with each author set to receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner will be crowned on 12 November 2024 and will receive a £50,000 prize. You can find out more by visiting the Booker Prize website.
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