She won the top prize with a time-distorted novel set on the International Space Station. Yet, the writer reveals, Orbital is actually ‘a celebration of Earth’s beauty with a pang of loss’ – fuelled by her anxiety-induced insomnia
. Set on the International Space Station 250 miles from Earth, Orbital follows the day-to-day lives of four astronauts and two cosmonauts as they hurtle through the universe at 17,500mph. She was a few thousand words in and suddenly lost her nerve. She felt she was trespassing in space. “I am so spectacularly not an astronaut,” she laughs, when we meet for coffee the morning after the Booker ceremony. “I’m so unadventurous, so unaudacious, so impractical, cowardly, anxious. I would be terrible.
While it might be set in space, its subject is Earth. It is a 136-page love letter to our troubled planet – she calls it “space pastoral”, a kind of nature writing of the universe. “I wanted to write a celebration of the Earth’s beauty, but with a sense of sorrow or a pang of loss because of what we’re doing to it,” she says. Softly spoken, with a cloud of fair hair and delicate features, Harvey has an ethereal, otherworldly quality.
She found her escape both in front of her nose and 250 miles away. She takes the idea of an armchair traveller to a new frontier, spending “thousands and thousands” of hours orbiting the globe in cyberspace. Her sleeplessness also gave her a heightened sense of happiness and joy, and it was from this euphoric place – “almost like being in love” – that she set out to write Orbital. Insomnia even changed how she writes: both her memoir and Orbital were completed in short, concentrated bursts.
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