On Reading with Samantha Harvey

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Welcome to the third season of the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Quick housekeeping, in the show notes you will find a link to send us a voice note, should you feel the urge.

Our guest today is Samantha Harvey who is a British novelist and a senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her Phd centred on writing philosophical fiction. She has published five novels and one work of non-fiction, and her work has been shortlisted for the Women's Prize, the James Tait Black Award and the Walter Scott Prize.

Her debut, The Wilderness, was narrated from inside the mind of a man with Alzheimer's and won the Betty Trask Prize. Her non-fiction book The Shapeless Unease is an account of a year of severe insomnia, exploring how prolonged sleeplessness changes the way you think, write, and experience time.

Her most recent novel, Orbital, was published in 2023 and won the 2024 Booker Prize - one of the shortest novels ever to do so. Harvey wrote much of it during COVID lockdowns, watching live footage from the ISS.

Her work consistently returns to questions of consciousness, perception, and attention - how we experience time, place, and the limits of what the human mind can hold.

We talk about:

• What is reading
• Can we still pay attention?
• A love letter to planet Earth
• The value of new media
• How she got 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets into one day
• It’s the reader who finishes the novel
• The humbling impact of the Overview effect
• How to be an intrepid explorer from your desk

Let’s go into orbit!

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