How a space fan's earthly tale won the Booker

Samantha Harvey talks major win

A lifelong fascination with outer space inspired British author Samantha Harvey to write her novel Orbital, which this week won the prestigious Booker Prize.

"It seems a slightly eccentric choice because I didn't know anything about space but I've always been interested in it," Harvey told AFP in an interview on Thursday.

The 49-year-old author admitted that she had no specialist knowledge but was instead inspired by the live video feed from the International Space Station. "You can sort of travel with the astronauts around the Earth," Harvey said. "That's what I did for years, I just travelled around each day."

At 136 pages, the book is the second-shortest to win the prize and covers the briefest timeframe of any on the shortlist - just over 24 hours.

Touching on themes of mourning, desire and the climate crisis, it recounts a day aboard the ISS and the 16 sunrises seen by its astronauts as they circumnavigate the Earth.

Harvey, whose first book The Wilderness came out in 2009 and was longlisted for that year's Booker, admitted to being on a high since her win.

But she insisted: "I think this novel is really more about the Earth than it is about space itself.

"It allowed me to write about time, the upending of time, the strange experience of time, that is something I think I've been interested in all of my novels."

The chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, described Orbital as "a book about a wounded world" and said he and his colleagues unanimously praised its "beauty and ambition".

The prize was awarded as the UN climate change conference was being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, and just after the re-election of climate sceptic Donald Trump as US president.

Harvey said she had no other agenda but was aware that the issue of climate change - and the protection of space itself - would crop up.

"We are exploiting and trashing space in the same way we have exploited and trashed this planet," she said but denied adopting a prescriptive approach to readers. "My responsibility to the book is an aesthetic one," she went on.

"And if it were to have an impact that were positive, that could contribute towards changes in whatever tiny way, then I would be absolutely delighted. But I think that's something that's entirely beyond my remit."