It takes 90 minutes for the International Space Station to orbit the Earth. That journey happens 16 times in Orbital, which just won one of the world's top literary awards.
Orbital is Samantha Harvey 's fifth novel. Her last novel The Western Wind was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 euros.English author Samantha Harvey has won the prestigious Booker Prize , worth 50,000 British pounds , for her novel, Orbital , about a team of six astronauts on board the International Space Station.The author was longlisted in 2009 for her debut novel about dementia The Wilderness.
The book was chosen unanimously by the judges, in recognition of "its beauty and ambition", and its "capaciousness and resonance". Prize chair de Waal described this year's shortlist as "storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity".Harvey — the author of five novels — has long been fascinated by space. As a teenager, she would go to the library to collect quotes from astronauts.Alexei Leonov, a Soviet cosmonaut, saying: "I believe I never knew what the word 'round' meant until I saw the Earth from space.
With Orbital, Harvey says she wanted to create a "hybrid of nature writing about space — of looking at space as perhaps our one remaining wilderness — and also I wanted it to read like painting". In Orbital, the ISS travels low above the planet over the course of a day, as the astronauts — from America, Japan, the UK, Italy nd Russia — observe the changing landscapes and seasons, including glaciers, deserts and a typhoon, collect meteorological data and conduct experiments. But the realities of their lives back at home intrude upon their work.
Booker Prize Announcement Man Booker Prize Winners Booker Prize Booker Prize 2024 Booker Prize Winner 2024 Booker Prize Winners List Orbital Samantha Harvey Orbital Samantha Harvey
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