Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey was born in 1975 in Ditton, Kent, near Maidstone, England. She spent her early childhood there, and after her parents' divorce moved frequently, including stints in York, Sheffield, and Japan. She studied philosophy at the University of York and the University of Sheffield, earned an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University in 2005, and completed a PhD in creative writing. She teaches as a Reader on the MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University. Harvey's debut novel The Wilderness (2009), exploring Alzheimer's through fractured prose, won the Betty Trask Prize. Subsequent works include All Is Song (2012), Dear Thief (2014), and The Western Wind (2018). Her non-fiction work The Shapeless Unease (2020) recounts her severe insomnia. Her novel Orbital (2023), set over twenty-four hours aboard the International Space Station, won the 2024 Booker Prize and the 2024 Hawthornden Prize, and was praised by Mark Haddon as 'one of the most beautiful novels I have read in a very long time.'