'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey is the first Booker Prize winner set in space

Samantha Harvey talks about her new Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital. It follows a day in the life of astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The novel "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey has won the Booker Prize. That's the U.K.'s most prestigious literary award. The book is about a single day in the life of six astronauts on board a space station orbiting the Earth. Here's Andrew Limbong, host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast, with more.

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Good news for anyone looking to squeeze in one more book before the end of the year - "Orbital" is only about 130 pages long. It's the second-shortest book to win the Booker Prize. But that doesn't mean its ideas are small. Samantha Harvey was on NPR in 2023 when the book first came out in the States, and she said that she'd been spending a lot of time on YouTube, watching videos of the Earth from space.

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SAMANTHA HARVEY: And I was so overwhelmed by the extraordinary beauty and strangeness of our planet.

LIMBONG: The six astronauts contend with the expanse of the universe, the meaning of God, climate change, the passage of time. They also have to, you know, live their lives.

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HARVEY: You have to do the dusting and the vacuuming and fix the toilet and, you know, all of these things. And there isn't much between that very routine mundaneness and the kind of gob-smacking or inspiring reality of what's going on around you.

LIMBONG: Edmund de Waal, chair of this year's judges, said in a statement that the book was propelled by beauty. Quote, "with her language of lyricism and acuity, Harvey makes our world strange and new for us."

Andrew Limbong, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.