orbital

Samantha Harvey, author of “Orbital,” took home the award Tuesday.

“Compact yet beautifully expansive, Orbital invites us to observe the Earth’s splendour, whilst reflecting on the individual and collective value of every human life,” the Booker Prize judges wrote.

“All year we have celebrated fiction that inhabits ideas rather than declaiming on issues, not finding answers but changing the question of what we wanted to explore. Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey’s extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share.”

“Orbital” is enjoying some popular as well as critical success.

In an interview on the prize website, she described “Orbital” as a space pastoral and said she wanted to write a realistic, rather than fantastic, version of humans in low Earth orbit.