Thursday, November 14, 2024

Author who spent lockdown watching space livestreams to research astronaut novel wins Booker Prize

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Of working on Orbital in lockdown, she said: “I would have footage of the Earth in low earth orbit on my desktop all the time I wrote. It was my main reference point.

“It felt like such a beautiful liberation to be able to do that every day, and at the same time 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.”

‘A book that repays slow reading’

Harvey said she had asked herself “why would anyone care what some woman in Wiltshire has to say about what it might be like to be in space”, and initially abandoned the book 5,000 words in.

But she returned to it and Orbital has been the best-selling of the six books on the shortlist, shifting 29,000 copies so far this year. Before it was shortlisted, it had sold 3,500 copies.

It had been the bookmakers’ joint favourite to win, alongside James by Percival Everett, who was the lone man on the six-strong shortlist.

At 136 pages, Orbital is the second-shortest Booker winner in history, four pages longer than Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1979 winner, Offshore.

Edmund de Waal, chair of the judges, said that the book could be re-read multiple times and offer something new. “This is a book that repays slow reading. You can have huge books that you race through in no time at all, but you can have books like this which are crystalline,” he said.

“The idea of passing the book onto someone else, that you must read this, this will change your life, this will start you on a path, this will bring you on a new experience – that has been the criteria.”

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