Samantha Harvey (author) facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Samantha Harvey
Harvey in 2019
Born	1975 (age 48–49) Kent, U.K.
Occupation	Novelist
Language	English
Alma mater	Bath Spa University
Genre	Literary fiction
Years active	2009–present
Notable works	The Wilderness (2009) Orbital (2023)
Notable awards	Betty Trask Prize (2009) Booker Prize (2024)

Samantha Harvey (born 1975) is an English novelist. She won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital.

Early life and education

Harvey spent the first decade of her life in Ditton, Kent, near Maidstone, the daughter of a builder, until her parents' divorce. After that, her mother moved to Ireland, and Harvey spent her teen years moving around with stints in York, Sheffield, and Japan. Harvey studied philosophy at the University of York and the University of Sheffield. She completed the Bath Spa University Creative Writing MA course in 2005, and has also completed a PhD in creative writing.

Career

Doing a headstand on stage at the 2014 Wigtown Book Festival

Her first novel, The Wilderness (2009), is written from the point of view of a man developing Alzheimer's disease, and describes through increasingly fractured prose the unravelling effect of the disease. Her second novel, All Is Song (2012), is a novel about moral and filial duty, and about the choice between questioning and conforming. The author has described the novel as a loose, modern day reimagining of the life of Socrates.

Her third novel, Dear Thief, is a long letter from a woman to her absent friend, detailing the emotional fallout of a love triangle. The novel is said to be based on the Leonard Cohen song "Famous Blue Raincoat". Dear Thief was published in 2014 by Jonathan Cape. Harvey's fourth novel, The Western Wind, about a priest in fifteenth-century Somerset, was published in March 2018.

The Shapeless Unease, her only work of non-fiction, is an account of her experience of severe insomnia. Her most recent novel, Orbital (2023), takes place on a space station over one day of low earth orbits, and was described by Mark Haddon as "one of the most beautiful novels I have read in a very long time".

Her short stories have appeared in Granta and on BBC Radio 4. She reviews for The Guardian and The New York Times, and has contributed essays and articles to The New Yorker, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and TIME, among other publications. Her radio appearances include on Radio 4's Front Row, Open Book, A Good Read and Start the Week, and Radio 3's Free Thinking.

On stage with Petina Gappah and Lee Randall at the 2015 Edinburgh International Book Festival

Harvey's novels have been considered for many prizes, including the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Walter Scott Prize, and the Orange Prize. In 2010, she was named one of the 12 best new British novelists by The Culture Show. In 2019, The Western Wind won the Staunch Book Prize.

Harvey is published in the UK by Jonathan Cape and in the US by Grove Atlantic. She is represented by the agent Anna Webber.

Harvey is a Reader on the MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University and a member of the academy for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and is as of 2023^[update] acting as a mentor for the Rathbones Folio Mentorships. She was a member of the jury for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has held writing fellowships at MacDowell in the US, Hawthornden in Scotland, and the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Italy.

She teaches regularly for Arvon Foundation, and runs writing courses annually in Spain with the author Emma Hooper.

Accolades

Harvey's writing has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf, and she has been praised for her lyrical prose and insightful explorations of the human psyche.

Nominations and prizes

Orbital won the Booker Prize on 12 November 2024.

Translations

Harvey's novels have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Norwegian, Portuguese and Romanian.

See also

In Spanish: Samantha Harvey para niños