Escape velocity

She has been making news for her ineffably beautiful novel, Orbital, which follows six astronauts on board a space station, observing them as they observe their home planet. The novel recently won the Booker Prize. 'I wrote it with a sense of sorrow, of wanting to almost memorialise Earth as our home and as something fundamentally unboundaried and beautiful,' Harvey says

- Kanika Sharma

At 49, Samantha Harvey has won the Booker Prize for her fifth novel, Orbital, which flips humanity's traditional view of the skies - feet planted firmly on the ground, eyes trained upwards-and directs our gaze at Earth as seen from a distance: luminous, rare..., and endangered.

The book follows six astronauts aboard a fictionalised International Space Station, through a single day (16 orbits, of 90 minutes each). Adding a layer of nostalgia to the intricate view she builds, is the fact that, in the real world, the ISS will soon be decommissioned, and the skies are set to get much busier as private corporations take increasingly to space, looking for new worlds to draw from, and possibly call home.

"This is a book we need now, but it may also be a book we'll need forever," is how Booker Prize jury member Sara Collins put it.

Harvey, who grew up between Sheffield, York and Japan after her parents' divorce and currently lives in Bath, has a degree in philosophy and a PhD in creative writing.

What made her shape Orbital as she did, slender on narrative but bursting with joy and loss? Excerpts from an interview.

When you won the Booker, you dedicated it to people who speak "for and not against the Earth; for and not against the dignity of other humans...and for peace." Is Orbital, in this sense, a political novel?

I don't see Orbital as a political novel. I don't see it as climate fiction, although, if it contributes to the conversation around climate change, and instils a sense of urgency in us, then I would be delighted.

It is an emotional project for me, and part of that emotion is in sort of being in Low Earth Orbit, and looking back at our planet as something extraordinary and precious, beyond words and comprehension, since it is our home. It's the only home we have.