Meet the artist behind the cover of this year’s Booker Prize winner

Last week, thousands watched as English writer Samantha Harvey was awarded the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital, one of the shorter winners in the competition's history.

Its cover—a soft-edged, inky interpretation of space—was designed by Helsinki-based artist Aino-Maija Metsola. She is known for her use of watercolour to ink, collage, markers, and gouache to craft paintings, patterns, and illustrations. Her work on the illustration and lettering of book covers began with novels by Virginia Woolf, some of which were published in 2016 as a paperback series.

Since then, Metsola has occasionally illustrated book covers published by Vintage/Penguin. She says: "Collaborating with the Vintage art department has always been very smooth and nice.

"It's very important to have a good and functioning connection with the designers and art directors in order to create a cover that supports the book."

Metsola has shared such a relationship with Vintage Books creative director Suzanne Dean and, more recently, Headline Publishing Group's senior book designer Yeti Lambregts. Dean contacted her about designing the cover for Orbital, as she felt that Metsola's delicate but powerful style would work well with this text.

Her illustrations are both captivating but not too obvious. "They should have depth and evoke thoughts," says Metsola. "A sense of wonder is very important to me, and I think it resonates with this book."

The brief required a cover with space, planets, stars, and similar imagery and asked Metsola to transform this idea into a fascinating and captivating image. She says, "The plan was to create an illustration that captures the view that the astronauts can see looking down onto Earth from space."

Metsola prefers working by hand through painting and drawing, and she often reserves the computer for finishing touches only. She adds, "When I create illustrations for book covers, I prefer to produce a lot of raw material by hand, and then I create the composition in Photoshop.

"This way, the process is more efficient and adaptive to demands and suggestions from the publisher."

For Orbital, Metsola used watercolours to paint a series of planets, swirls, and the Earth before combining them so they could wrap around the book. Throughout the process, she was constantly in discussion with the designer Yeti Lambregts about the composition, making changes to accommodate typography and other elements.

"Illustrating any book cover is, of course, always a challenge, as you have to find a way to pay respect to the content whilst trying to set yourself free to create," Metsola explains. But, when illustrating this cover, she found it quite easy to connect with the story and work to the detailed brief.

In this case, it was a blessing to have stricter requirements as Metsola was working from a summary of the text due to time constraints. She reveals that this is quite often the case, and so reading the summary and getting thoughts from the publisher is the next best thing.