Samantha Harvey for Bundanon

Winner of the Booker Prize 2024 for her novel Orbital, Samantha Harvey speaks to fellow author Ashley Hay about the splendour of Earth and making the familiar new for readers.

In Orbital, six astronauts and cosmonauts – from America, Russia, Italy, the UK and Japan – rotate in the International Space Station. They are there to do vital work, but slowly they begin to wonder: what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?

Samantha, whose writing has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf, is known for the enormous variety in her novels. In 2017, she told The Bookseller, “I try to do something formally different with each novel”. From her debut The Wilderness, following an architect suffering from Alzheimer’s, to The Western Wind, about a priest in 15th century Somerset, to her non-fiction debut The Shapeless Unease, exploring her personal experience of chronic insomnia, Samantha has covered a wide breadth of the human experience.