Booker Prize Winner 2024
News
BSU alumna and lecturer Samantha Harvey crowned winner of the Booker Prize 2024
Wednesday, 13 November, 2024Bath Spa University alumna and Reader in English and Creative Writing, Samantha Harvey has won the prestigious Booker Prize 2024 - announced in London’s Old Billingsgate yesterday evening.
Renowned as one of the UK’s most prestigious literary awards, the Booker Prize features the most impressive works of sustained fiction and has catapulted exceptional literature into the spotlight for the last 55 years.
Sam’s novel, Orbital, takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts. During those 24 hours, they observe 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets over their silent blue planet, spinning past continents and cycling past seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans.
In the novel, she contemplates the world from a different viewpoint as it follows the team of astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Writing it, Sam said she "thought of it as a space pastoral - a kind of nature writing about the beauty of space".
On receiving her award, Sam dedicated the prize to "all the people who speak for and not against the Earth and work for and not against peace."
Sam completed a MA in Creative Writing at BSU in 2004. Shortly after completing her Master’s degree, she moved on to a PhD at the University, taking up a teaching post on the MA, and later as a PhD supervisor.
Sam said she questioned herself while writing the book:
"Why would anybody want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space when people have actually been there?
"I lost my nerve with it and I thought I didn't have the authority to write it."
Speaking to BBC News, Sam said she was "in complete shock and very overwhelmed." She added that the award would change her life.
Sam is the first woman to win the award since 2019 and this lifechanging prize will see the winning author’s career transported to new heights, with a £50,000 prize and a trophy named after previous winner, Iris Murdoch. Asked how she would spend the prize money, she said: "I need to buy myself a new bike, and it's going to be a good bike."
Head of School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities at BSU, Alison Hems said:
“We are all delighted by Sam's success. This is an extraordinary achievement, but then so is the book itself: a work of such skill and grace, that holds up the Earth for us to see as though from space and yet close-up, at the same time. It is both timely and timeless, and as others have already observed, the book we need now.”
Orbital is already the biggest-selling book on the shortlist in the UK and has also outsold the past three Booker winners combined, up to the eve of their success. It is the second-shortest book to win the prize and covers the briefest timeframe of any book on the shortlist.
Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, described Orbital as a "book about a wounded world."
He said the judges all recognised its "beauty and ambition" and praised her "language of lyricism." After announcing the shortlist, Booker Prize judges shared their thoughts on the six selected books, explaining why they’re worth the read. Discussing what sets Orbital apart, they said:
“This novel is superbly crafted and lyrically stunning. Sentence after sentence is charged with the kind of revelatory excitement that in a lesser book would be eked out of plot alone.”
Sam previously told BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme she wrote Orbital over the course of successive lockdowns.
"I was writing about six people trapped in a tin can. It felt like there was something resonant about that and our experience of lockdown, of not being able to escape each other and also not being able to get to other people."
Co-ordinator of Graduate Studies and Research Management, Richard Kerridge, said:
“This extraordinary, original, lyrical novel combines a profound recognition of humanity's shared responsibility for the earth and all its creatures with a moving awareness of human differences of experience and culture. That combination is one that we desperately need, and the book achieves it beautifully.”
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