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


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The International Space Station

MSFC/NASA

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…

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