The Booker Prize, a prestigious literary prize which rewards works of fiction in English, was awarded on Tuesday to the British Samantha Harvey for her fifth novel “Orbital”, after a competition dominated by women.
At the end of a ceremony organized on Tuesday in London, Samantha Harvey won the Booker Prize 2024. She won against four women and one man.
The British writer is rewarded for “Orbital”, her fifth novel. Full of lyricism, it tells the story of a day in the life of six astronauts, two men and four women, aboard a space station. Constructed in almost meditative fragments, this book offers a reflection on mourning, desire and the climate crisis. The subject of the book is not so much the discovery of space, but more the place of humans in the universe.
A work already published in French
“Orbital” is in line with previous texts by Samantha Harvey, a 49-year-old novelist, which are intended to be explorations of the human psyche. Like his book on memory loss (“The Lost Memory”, Stock) or on his insomnia (“The Shapeless Unease”, not translated). This work was published in March 2024 in French by Flammarion. It was very well received by international critics.
Samantha Harvey is the first award-winning author since 2019, the year when the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the British Bernardine Evaristo won the tie, and succeeds the Irish writer Paul Lynch.
“I’m completely overwhelmed,” she declared on stage during her award ceremony. Emue, the 49-year-old novelist also said she wanted to “dedicate this prize to all those who speak out to defend, and not criticize, our planet, those who speak out to defend the dignity of other humans and those who speak out and work for peace.
At a press conference, she reiterated her words assuring that it was impossible for her not to mention “the difficult situation in which the world finds itself”.
Promise of international fame
Samantha Harvey defied the odds which favored Americans Rachel Kushner and Percival Everett. The latter, a multi-award winner, was the big favorite in this competition with “James”, a book which revisits one of the masterpieces of American literature: “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884) by Mark Twain.
Launched in 1969, the Booker Prize rewards each year the author of the “best novel written in English”. Compared to the French Goncourt, he has contributed to the success of writers like Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature, who won it in 2016 with “The Vegetarian”. The prize is a reward of 50,000 books (around 56,000 francs) and the promise of international fame synonymous with success in bookstores.
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