Samantha Harvey | Orbital
Wed 23 Apr 2025 | 6:00pm - 7:00pm



How lucky are we to be kicking off the Spring Festival with Samantha Harvey talking about her Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital? This beautiful uplifting book follows a team of astronauts in the International Space Station as they circle the Earth in all its spectacular beauty and begin to ask, ‘What is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?’
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from Earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without Earth? What is Earth without humanity?
In conversation with Alex Clark
Venue: University Arms
Duration: 1 hour
Choose your tickets:
Author Biography
Samantha Harvey is the author of the novels Orbital, The Wilderness, All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind, and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping. Her work has been nominated for the Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women’s Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize and Orbital is the winer of the Booker Prize 2024. She is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.