LONDON: British writer Samantha Harvey on Tuesday won the 2024 Booker Prize, a prestigious English-language literary award, for her novel tracking six astronauts in space for 24 hours.
Harvey’s “Orbital” follows two men and four women from Japan, Russia, the United States, Britain and Italy aboard the International Space Station and touches on mourning, desire and the climate crisis.
The 49-year-old Harvey previously made the longlist for the Booker Prize in 2009 with her debut novel “The Wilderness.”
Harvey dedicated the prize to “all the people who speak for and not against the earth and work for and not against peace.”
Chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal, said “everyone and no one is the subject” of the novel, “as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones.”
“With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.”
A record five women were in the running for the £50,000 ($64,500) prize which was announced at a glitzy ceremony in London.
Previous winners include Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood.
The prize is seen as a talent spotter of names not necessarily widely known to the general public.
The Booker is open to works of fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024.
UK writer Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker with space novel
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UK writer Samantha Harvey wins 2024 Booker with space novel
- The prize is seen as a talent spotter of names not necessarily widely known to the general public
What We Are Reading Today: A Capital’s Capital
Authors: Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
Successful economies sustain capital accumulation across generations, and capital accumulation leads to large increases in private wealth. In this book, Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal map the fluctuations in wealth and its distribution in Paris between 1807 and 1977.
Drawing on a unique dataset of the bequests of almost 800,000 Parisians, they show that real wealth per decedent varied immensely during this period while inequality began high and declined only slowly.
Parisians’ portfolios document startling changes in the geography and types of wealth over time.
Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal’s account reveals the impact of economic factors (large shocks, technological changes, differential returns to wealth), political factors (changes in taxation), and demographic and social factors (age and gender) on wealth and inequality.
Before World War I, private wealth was highly predictive of other indicators of welfare, including different forms of human capital, age at death, and access to local public goods.
