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Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey is an English novelist known for her contemplative and lyrical prose. Best known for her novels and memoir, Harvey's work ranges from human psychology themes to characters' existential reflections in isolated settings. Her notable novels include The Wilderness (2009), The Western Wind (2018) and Orbital (2023), the latter of which won the Booker Prize in 2024, one of Britain's most prestigious literary awards.

Born in Ditton, Kent, Samantha Harvey spent her early years in a working-class family. Following her parents' divorce, her mother moved to Ireland, and Harvey's childhood was marked by moves, including stints in York, Sheffield and Japan.
She studied Philosophy at the Universities of York and Sheffield and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in 2005. Harvey also completed a PhD in Creative Writing, which laid the foundations for her introspective, nuanced writing style.

Harvey's debut novel, The Wilderness, captures the deteriorating mind of a man with Alzheimer's, a perspective rendered through increasingly fragmented prose. This innovative work won Harvey the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize, marking her early career with critical acclaim.

Her subsequent works have continued to explore complex human emotions and moral issues. All Is Song (2012), loosely inspired by the life of Socrates, explores the tension between moral duty and societal norms.

Her third novel, Dear Thief (2014), is a raw, introspective letter from a woman to an estranged friend, exploring themes of love, betrayal and memory. The Western Wind, set in a 15th-century English village, follows a priest as he unravels a mystery amid turbulent waters, both literal and metaphorical. This historical novel won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize.

In 2020, Harvey moved into non-fiction with The Shapeless Unease, an account of her battle with insomnia, praised for its frank and visceral portrayal of insomnia and its psychological effects. Harvey's latest work, Orbital (2023), delves into the lives of six astronauts orbiting the Earth on a mission of beauty and fragility.

Observing the planet from the International Space Station, the characters grapple with isolation, camaraderie and Earth's profound beauty. As they experience 16 sunrises and sunsets daily, Harvey uses their journey to meditate on humanity's place in the cosmos.

Acclaimed by critics and fellow writers alike, Orbital was described by Mark Haddon as "one of the most beautiful novels I have read in a long time". The novel was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction in 2024 and won both the InWords Literary Award and the Hawthornden Prize.
On accepting the Booker Prize, Harvey remarked, "Why on earth would anyone want to hear from a woman at her desk in Wiltshire writing about space?"

Samantha Harvey lives in Bath, UK, and is a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Photo credit: www.samanthaharvey.co.uk
години от живота: 1975 понастоящем

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finalfadeoutцитирапреди 2 месеца
Some alien civilisation might look on and ask: what are they doing here? Why do they go nowhere but round and round? The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.
finalfadeoutцитирапреди 2 месеца
We make wishful and fearful projections through books, films and the like about how it might look, this alien life, when it finally makes contact. But it doesn’t make contact and we suspect in truth that it never will. It’s not even out there, we think. Why bother waiting when there’s nothing there? And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.
finalfadeoutцитирапреди 2 месеца
So then come discrepancies and gaps. They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for.

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