Samantha Harvey grew up in Kent near Maidstone and spent her teenage years living in York, Sheffield and Japan. After studying philosophy at the University of York and the University of Sheffield, she went on to complete a master’s degree and a PhD in creative writing at Bath Spa University, where she now works as a Reader in Creative Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta and on BBC Radio 4, and she has written reviews, essays and articles for the New Yorker, the Guardian, TIME, and the New York Times, among other publications.
In 2009, Harvey published her debut novel The Wilderness, which is told from the point of view of a man in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. It was followed by All Is Song (2012); Dear Thief (2015) which was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and The Western Wind (2018), which won the Staunch Prize 2019 and was nominated for the Walter Scott Prize in the same year, as well as featuring as the Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for March 2019. In 2020, Harvey published Shapeless Unease, a memoir about her year of suffering from intense insomnia, which doubles as a startlingly insightful meditation on memory, reality, grief and writing.
Harvey’s fourth novel Orbital (2023) – a luminous, quietly transformative story of six astronauts in space, reflecting on life back on Planet Earth – earned her the Booker Prize in 2024, hailed by the judges for its lyricism, resonance and acuity.
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