The recently announced winner of The Booker Prize 2024 was Samantha Harvey for her novel Orbital. In the words of Guardian reviewer Stephanie Merritt, “Reading Orbital is a dizzying experience; she evokes the texture of daily life in the space station and pans out to sweeping, lyrical descriptions of the natural world, underpinning both with profound questions about our place in the cosmos. It is an extraordinary achievement, containing multitudes.” Emma Clegg talks to Samantha about this seismic yet tender book, as the author adjusts to a changing landscape…
Six astronauts rotate around the Earth in the International Space Station (ISS). They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity? This is the concept of Orbital, the novel by Samantha Harvey, announced as the 2024 winner of The Booker Prize in November last year. Since its inception in 1969, the prize has celebrated exceptional fiction, with the judges’ choice of book each year representing the best longform work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.
A review by Alexandra Harris in The Guardian praises the novel’s vast, breathtaking scope and its descriptive charge: “From up here, 250 miles above the surface, Japan is a wisp. The Philippines appear ‘scarily frail’. Though the views are on a planetary scale, the object of their mesmerised observation is as intricate as a Fabergé egg… The astronauts who turn and turn through Samantha Harvey’s finely crafted meditation on the Earth, beauty and human aspiration are in the process of understanding themselves in new ways, too.”
Samantha, who teaches creative writing at postgraduate level and is a PhD supervisor at Bath Spa University, explains that her initial motivation wasn’t to write about a space station. “It was to write about the Earth from space, to try to find a vantage point from which to write a kind of pastoral novel.”
For an earthly being who was not an astronaut, watching live stream videos of the Earth from the ISS was the way into this unparalleled endeavour. “I thought, ‘well, that’s such an extraordinary view. And there is so much I feel when I see those images in that video footage – I wonder if I could put that into words?’ So then I started writing.”
Samantha explains that the obvious focus was the space station. “And that, in itself, became more and more interesting as a stage setting, and the idea of pastoral became more poignant and personal. The ISS itself is in its dying days, and in some senses it’s a bit of a rattling relic, because it’s been hurtling around Earth for 25 years, and it encapsulates a sense of an era of (at least attempts at) peaceful cooperation between Russia and the West, and internationally. And the more I looked into it, the more I thought there’s a nostalgia built into that view of the Earth from this space station. You’re looking at the Earth as a damaged system, but also an extraordinarily beautiful planet, and looking from a place that embodies an era that is now in the rear view mirror.”
Was this choice of subject ambitious, given the fact that Samantha leads a low-tech life, without social media accounts or a mobile phone? “I think people find it strange that I haven’t got a mobile phone and yet I’ve written about space, as if these two things are incompatible, but they’re not. Part of this novel was a form of escapism for me. I feel like I was born in the wrong century in some ways – while I love modern comforts, I find the world very noisy. I want to get away from the clamour of it. And escaping into space to write the novel comes from that same impulse to get away, to be somewhere quiet. And when I finished writing it, I felt a sense of loss that I don’t normally feel when I finish writing a novel.”
Samantha’s research was enmeshed in the novel’s creation, drawing from resources such as the NASA and the European Space Agency websites, and documents detailing life aboard the ISS. “The research continued all the way through. I love research, and I see it completely continuous with fiction writing – they are feeding one another all the time. Often a piece of research comes along that takes you in a direction you never expected, and that opens this new creative door, so the two things are in harmony with one another.
“Then, of course, there are the images, the video footage, the photographs – those were the things that I returned to every day, and I wrote from those, because visual imagery is the bedrock of the novel, and I wanted it to feel like a painting.”
One of the most striking features of Orbital is its lack of plot. The novel is divided into 16 chapters, reflecting the 16 revolutions of the space station around Earth over 24 hours. Samantha explains, “It is free of plot, and I always wanted that to be the case. I wanted to write this book in a free, impulsive way, partly because my last book [The Shapeless Unease, 2020] was an account of my insomnia and was written in a completely instinctive way, to the point where it has no narrative architecture. I knew that I couldn’t really do that with a novel, but I wanted to bring across some of that free, instinctive writing that just allows the prose to go wherever it wants to go, just like water flowing.”
Samantha continues, “That was always my intention, and because the book is set over one typical day on the space station, there isn’t any plot, thank goodness. I mean, no astronaut wants there to be a plot! So I wanted to convey that sense of this as a domestic environment.”
The novel offsets the everyday routines of the space station with the magnificent scale of the encompassing ‘landscape’: “It’s a mundane environment: they are doing a lot of housekeeping, they’re doing experiments, and they live by a regimented schedule, and I wanted to get that across in the rhythms of the book, so that while nothing happens, also everything happens. It’s about the contradictions of repetition and mundaneness against the extraordinariness and majesty of their environment. You know, Africa happens beneath them while they’re vacuuming.”
Samantha has always been drawn to using the structure and form of a novel to articulate something fundamental about what is being written that you can’t actually say in words. “Somehow it doesn’t come across powerfully enough if you say it, but if you include it in the structure, then you can articulate it all the more powerfully. That was part of the rationale for setting Orbital over one day, so I could bake into the structure of the novel the sense of the strangeness of time, that in one 24 hour period, the ISS has been around the Earth 16 times.”
Part of this experimentation with language sees her challenging herself around the written structure. “I’m really interested in fiction in writing narratives that don’t depend on conflict. It’s always easier to write something that has conflict in it, because it is a great generator of drama. But what is it to write a narrative that is propulsive and has momentum and makes the reader want to turn the page, but which doesn’t depend on conflict? To keep the whole thing feeling like it’s moving forward, even though ‘nothing’ is happening?”
It’s about the contradictions of repetition and mundaneness against the extraordinariness and majesty of their environment. You know, Africa happens beneath them while they’re vacuuming
Samantha’s mastery of the written form has a strong resonance in Bath, where she teaches as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing on the MA and as a PhD supervisor at Bath Spa University. There was even a time in the 2000s when she worked at the Herschel Museum, where she was inspired by the scientific discovery of Uranus. “I was very interested in the Herschels and their story, the incredible discovery of Uranus from the back garden, and the fact that it doubled the size of the known Solar System at the time, and the whole endeavour of discovery and scientific progress. Who knows, I’m sure it had some effect on my latest novel, but it wasn’t a direct one!”
At Bath Spa University she finds teaching postgraduates particularly rewarding: “It’s the lovely end of teaching. At postgraduate level there is no level of crowd control – everyone is there every week, and they always do their work. They are so motivated and come to the course with really powerful dreams. It’s always felt like an enormous privilege to work with those people as students, with such interesting, intelligent, brilliant people.”
Teaching also serves as a reflection of her own growth as a writer: “I find that teaching is an interesting mirror for me to see where I am as a writer, which is reflected in the advice I give my students. I frequently think, ‘is something I said 10 years ago true for me anymore?’ Often I’ve changed the way I see something, and so I try to update my teaching practice to reflect that.”
In the short time since she won The Booker Prize, Samantha’s life and perspective has shifted. “In some ways, it hasn’t changed at all, because I have a daily life to go about, and you still find yourself vacuuming and washing up. But in other ways, it’s a fundamental change, because it moves the dial on my work, on my career. I was busy anyway, but it has ramped up another gear, and I’m thinking ahead to how 2025 might look. But the biggest change is that I feel a huge liberation, a huge release of a pressure that I didn’t exactly know was there. This is the ultimate affirmation in the literary world, an enormous validation that even your own sabotaging self can’t undermine.”
Might a trip to space ever be a reality for Samantha? It seems not. “I get travel sick if I sit in the back of a car so I can’t imagine what I’d be like in space – I’d be such a liability and they would probably throw me overboard.”
Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Vintage Publishing, £9.99
“In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world.
Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. We wanted everything.”
Edmund de Waal, Chair of judges, The Booker Prize 2024