Booker winner Samantha Harvey: ‘My grandad bought land in Donegal. He was afraid of nuclear war, and thought Ireland would be exempt’

Samantha Harvey is tired. This is not necessarily unusual: she is a champion insomniac who wrote about her experience of sleeplessness in her 2020 memoir The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. But today Harvey has an additional reason: when we speak, it’s about 18 hours since she won the Booker Prize for fiction with her novel Orbital, and she has had “very little” sleep.
“You get whisked away to do publicity afterwards,” she tells me from the Booker PR offices in central London. “Everyone else can celebrate but you can’t because you’re doing press. I’m not complaining!” she adds quickly.
Harvey’s win is for her fifth novel, Orbital, which is tiny in extent – it comes in at under 140 pages – but huge in scope. It describes the lives of six astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station over a 24-hour period, during which time they orbit the Earth 16 times. Passing over, they see the beauty of the planet – but they also see the devastation mankind has wreaked on the climate, through a “supertyphoon” that destroys everything in its path.
It’s not surprising then that Orbital, for all its serene descriptions (Harvey thinks of it as “nature writing about the beauty of space”), has been greeted as a climate change novel. The chairman of this year’s Booker judges, Edmund de Waal, described it as “a book about a wounded world”.
Indeed, before Orbital won the Booker, it was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Does Harvey see it as a political novel? “It’s a novel about climate change by implication,” she says. “If you’re going to look at the Earth from that distance, and take in the topography, and how you can see the weather moving across the Earth, then you’re writing a climate novel, you’re writing a political novel just by implication. But that was never my overt intention.”
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Can a novel make a political difference anyway? “We were talking about this yesterday and Edmund [de Waal], one of the judges, said, maybe a novel can’t make a direct political difference but it can make a difference to an individual reader [who] can then make a direct political difference by voting or how they consume things. [But] also I think it’s not a novel’s job to make a difference. A novel’s responsibility as an artwork is purely aesthetic, to be the most perfectly articulated version of itself.”
One of the themes that run through the book is the irony of how we need our trusty old planet – the astronauts are at risk of their muscles wasting, for example, through lack of gravity to work against – and yet we only appreciate it when we view it from afar. Do we take the Earth for granted?
“I think it’s self-evidently true that at some level we don’t value the Earth, because we are destroying it. There’s this ‘overview effect’ astronauts have when they see Earth from space, and they’re given an insight into what the Earth is and how we must protect it. [So] I’m quite surprised that more astronauts aren’t at the coalface of climate action.”
In Orbital, the effects of climate change are described as “man’s neurotic assault on the planet”, and it’s not hard to feel despair in the present situation. Does Harvey have any room for optimism in these circumstances?
“At the moment, I don’t, really. The other day, for example, when the UN said we were on course for a climate catastrophe, on the BBC Radio news, it was the fourth or fifth item, and it was passed over quite quickly. And I suppose there is [a risk of being] overwhelmed because people don’t know what to do with this information. There’s a strange disconnect between the facts and how we are being asked to apprehend the facts. Not just that we are not encouraged to care, we are discouraged to care. We are encouraged to keep consuming and so on. In that sense, I feel it’s very hard to be optimistic about it but I suppose mankind is an ingenious creature.
“But I feel increasingly frustrated by our inactivity,” Harvey adds.
It’s not just inactivity, though, is it? I ask. With the re-election of Donald Trump, for example, who seems determined to tear up treaties and whose energy policy gets no further than “drill, baby, drill”, it’s actively making things worse. “Yeah, absolutely. It’s not inactivity, it’s not passive. It’s an active vandalism of the planet and an active disregard of the facts.”
Speaking of Trump, his new best buddy – and co-head of his new department of government efficiency – Elon Musk comes up in the novel, in spirit if not in name. The International Space Station (ISS) is a collaborative effort, and space is presented by Harvey as a universal and shared place. But one question occurs and recurs as a refrain: “With this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity?” The answer, both sarcastic and correct, offered by one character is: “With the gilded pens of billionaires.” Does it worry Harvey that space exploration now seems to be the specialist domain of rich tech bros like Musk and his SpaceX programme?
“It concerns me very much. Space exploration in and of itself is not a good thing, not a bad thing, it’s a very human thing. It’s driven by curiosity and adventurousness but I think we have an invitation to do things differently in space exploration. We have a paradigm on Earth where we’ve just trashed and burned and not really thought about the consequences of our actions, and have allowed enormous amounts of wealth and resource to fall into the hands of the very few. And all I see when I look at the future of space exploration is that again; and we could do it differently – more democratically, with more care, less exploitatively.”
Of course, if you see – as Musk appears to – humanity’s future as being off-planet, then you don’t need to worry about what you do to this one. “Yeah. And you don’t have to choose. We can focus our resources on Mars and we can focus our resources on the Earth. And the budget that’s used for space travel is so very, very small, relatively speaking. But there’s something symbolic about turning our back on this burning planet and starting to look towards another planet which is not inhabitable by any stretch of the imagination.”
Harvey did a lot of research on space exploration for Orbital – she spent “three years or so thinking about these things” – which is full of interesting details. Is it true, for example, that the ISS has separate toilets for the Russian cosmonauts and the American astronauts?
“It is true! As far as I know, there are Russian modules, and then the Nasa, ESA [European Space Agency] and Jaxa [Japanese Space Agency] modules. And there are toilets in the American bit and toilets in the Russian bit. And they’re quite different. Apparently, you have to do different training courses to use the different toilets.”
As mentioned above, Harvey suffered severe insomnia for years – “I go upstairs at night, I get beaten up, I come downstairs in the morning” – and in her book about it, she wrote that “I am sane when I write, my nerves settle.” Did writing Orbital help her insomnia?
“Well, I haven’t entirely got over my insomnia [but] certainly the act of writing … there’s something powerfully grounding for me when I write. It’s hard to talk about without sounding really pretentious, but we all have things we must do to feel most like ourselves. And for me that is writing. When I write, I enter a room in myself that I can’t get into any other way. When I don’t write, I generally feel a little bit insane.”
Harvey has been publishing fiction since 2009 – her debut novel, The Wilderness, was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She was born in England but when she was a child, her parents divorced and her mother moved to Ireland. (A country which is described in Orbital as being “always at least partly under cloud. I’m sorry about that little dig!” she now says.)
“In some ways [Ireland] has always been my second home. Back in the 1960s, my grandad bought some land and derelict cottages in Donegal. He was afraid of nuclear war, and somehow he thought Ireland would be exempt,” she laughs. “So my family in different formations has lived there ever since. My mum moved back to England but she was there for 20 years so I’ve been going there since I was a child.”
As we speak, I can see one of the Booker Prize team hovering in the background of Harvey’s room, as our allotted time nears the end. One final question, then: five novels in, does it get any easier?
“No, it doesn’t get any easier! Except in one way, which is that you learn to be less reactive to the different sorts of existential breakdowns you have along the way. So with the first novel, you’re a third of the way through, you think, it’s time to throw my laptop in the bin. Which I did try to do with my first novel. Now I get to that stage, I think, ‘oh, this is the crisis that I have a third of the way through’. So,” she concludes, “I am less reactive to the mistakes and the pitfalls, but they’re still there.”