Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey writes for Auraist on prose style: 'All writers walk around in a huff thinking their work deserves more respect.'

Detailed discussion of sentence mastery by the author of Orbital

Photo by Sarthak Maji

COMING SOON:

—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes.

—Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me on the 16th of November for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here.

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—‘Our fascination with stories that are believably made up has lately been a bit Top-Trumped by those that are unbelievably real. Real and yet new and bizarre and which ask nothing of us’: Samantha Harvey on prose style. Harvey’s novel Orbital won this year’s Booker Prize, and we chose it as the best-written work on the shortlists for the Booker and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for imaginative literature. You can read an extract here.

—’In a lifelong search for sanctuary and awareness, deep listening has become my way of leaning c…