Samantha Harvey: A Booker 2024 winner who wants to spend her money on sculpting

Samantha Harvey, the 2024 winner of the Booker Prize, is a former museum worker turned author.

Before snapping up the £50,000 literary prize on Tuesday for her novel Orbital, she said that she would like to spend the money on taking time out of her job to sculpt, and waste some of it on buying “expensive Danish liquorice”.

Harvey, a tutor in creative writing at Bath Spa University, grew up in Kent, and studied at York University.

Her debut novel The Wilderness first brought her recognition from the fiction world when she was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It won the Betty Trask Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Harvey followed this with All Is Song, Dear Thief, The Western Wind and a memoir, The Shapeless Unease.

The Western Wind, a 1400s Somerset-based detective novel, won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize.

Her fifth novel Orbital, has received critical praise, and takes place on one day when six astronauts aboard the International Space Station look down at the planet they call home.

According to the Booker Prize, it has sold more copies in total (29,000 books) than the last three winners combined had managed before they won.

Harvey recalled to BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme, how lockdown inspired her novel.

She said: “I would have footage of the Earth in low Earth orbit on my desktop all the time as I wrote. It was my main reference point.

“It felt such a beautiful liberation to be able to do that every day, and at the same time I was writing about six people trapped in a tin can.

“It felt like there was something resonant about that and our experience of lockdown, of not being able to escape each other and also not being able to get to other people.”

She also said that she had a “crisis of confidence and felt I was trespassing” so gave up writing the book, as she had never been in space, before returning to it.

“It had an energy and some sort of pulse to it that I connected with straight away,” Harvey said.

“So I thought ‘I’m going to do it’. I just had to do it well enough.”

Harvey also hosts writing retreats with Canadian writer Emma Hooper, and according to the Sunday Times has a life-size sculptor of her partner Rick near the back door of her home.

“I don’t even have a mobile phone,” she told the publication. “I just don’t feel the need.

“I really enjoy being away from home and that’s it, no-one can contact me. If I had one I’d be addicted to it.”