Orbital wins the Booker prize: “I see it as a kind of space pastoral”

Samantha Harvey, who has won the UK’s top fiction award, the Booker prize, for her novel Orbital, has created a new genre: nature writing about space.

“I see it as a kind of space pastoral,” Harvey told the New Scientist podcast earlier in the year. “I wanted to see what you could do with words in a painterly way to try to conjure up that rapturous, joyful, extraordinary and also now somewhat grief-stricken view of the Earth.”

Orbital takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station (ISS). There are six…