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 continues to cover a wide breadth of the human experience.
This event is presented in partnership with Sydney Writers’ Festival.
Click here to read the Sydney Writers’ Festival 2025 program.
Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey is the author of the novels Orbital, The Wilderness, All is Song, Dear Thief, and The Western Wind, and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping.
Orbital was the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, and her other work has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women’s Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. She is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
Thinking together: Exchanges with the natural world
This event is part of Bundanon’s program of live events for our current exhibition Thinking together: Exchanges with the natural world.
The exhibition explores themes of reciprocity and collaboration between the human and non-human. Each work responds to notions of community, and considers the possibility that new knowledge can only be created through a process of thinking together, via communal making, cooperation between the species and embodying First Nations practices of knowledge sharing.
