Booker Prize Winner Samantha Harvey on Writing, Time, and the Shape of a Life

Why It Matters

Harvey’s remarks illuminate how lived experience and formal experimentation shape contemporary literary work, showing why themes of time, solitude and grief have particular resonance after the pandemic. For readers and publishers, her melding of philosophical inquiry with narrative craft underscores the commercial and critical appeal of ambitious, idea-driven fiction.

Summary

Samantha Harvey traces her literary formation to watching her mother ghostwrite and to an early fascination with the passage of time, which she now explores obsessively through novels. Trained in philosophy, she turned to fiction as a more effective way to probe temporal experience, using narrative techniques to expand, compress and propel time. Harvey describes practical writing habits—needing quiet, sometimes working in a public library, and managing insomnia by redirecting her mind into lists—which also surface as formal elements in her work. Her latest novel engages themes of orbit, loss and isolation, informed in part by COVID-era experiences and personal ties to Japan.

Original Description

“Writing is a verb. It’s something you have to do.”

We met novelist and Booker Prize Winner Samantha Harvey, who has been called her generation’s Virginia Woolf.

”The novel is such a brilliant form for exploring time. Because you can do anything. There's no budget constraint with a novel. You can go anywhere in time. And you can push and pull time in a novel in very interesting ways.”

“I always write about time in different ways. The way it's just such a very artificial construct, and

yet it underpins absolutely everything that we do in our lives. And it is the one kind of organizing principle of our lives. You know, time happens to us. It abrades us. It eats away at us. Eventually, it kills us. That's what life is: It's a negotiation with time, and yet it's such a slippery thing, and it's

impossible to pin down and to measure.”

Samantha Harvey (b. 1975 in Kent) is an English novelist. She 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 later completed a PhD in creative writing. Harvey is the author of the novels The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief, The Western Wind, and Orbital, for which she won the Booker Prize in 2024. She is also the author of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease.

Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Western Wind won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize, and The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize.

Orbital was published in November 2023 and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, and the Climate Fiction Prize. It won the InWords Literary Award 2024, the 2024 Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and the Booker Prize that same year.

Samantha Harvey was interviewed by Synne Rifbjerg in Humlebæk, Denmark. The conversation took place during the Louisiana Literature festival in August 2025.

Camera: Simon Weyhe

Edit: Nanna Dahm

Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner

Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond.

Subscribe to our channel for more videos on literature: https://www.youtube.com/thelouisianachannel

FOLLOW US HERE:

Website: http://channel.louisiana.dk

Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/louisianachannel

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LouisianaChannel