Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey (born 1975) is an English novelist. She won the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, which drew on conventions from multiple genres and fields, including literary fiction, science fiction, and philosophy.

Early life and education Harvey spent the first decade of her life in Ditton, Kent, near Maidstone, until her parents' divorce. After that, her mother moved to Ireland, and Harvey spent her teenage 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

Harvey's 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 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 2023 novel, Orbital, won the 2024 Booker Prize. It 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". 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. 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.

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. 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.

Harvey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2025.

Nominations and prizes Year Title Award Category Result 2009 The Wilderness AMI Literature AwardThe Times of India — Betty Trask Prize and Awards Betty Trask Prize Guardian First Book Award — Man Booker Prize — Orange Prize for Fiction — 2015 Dear Thief Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction — James Tait Black Memorial Prize Fiction Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize — 2018 The Western Wind HWA Crown Award Gold Crown 2019Staunch Book Prize — Walter Scott Prize — 2020 International Dublin Literary Award — 2024 Orbital Booker Prize — Hawthornden Prize — The InWords Literary Award — Orwell Prize Political Fiction Ursula K. Le Guin Prize —