Since won the Booker Prize thanks to Orbital, Samantha Harvey's (Kent, 1975) diary has been filling up, and for now it is almost a feat to get to speak to her. Even so, the English author lives far from the media pressure, and not even the literary award, one of the most prestigious today, has managed to get her to buy a mobile phone. She speaks to us from the 16th century house where she lives, on the outskirts of Bath. It was there that she wrote her latest novel, in which she recounts a single day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station. While they orbit the Earth, the characters in the novel areOrbital (Edicions 62 / Anagrama; Catalan translation by Ernest Riera) concentrate on their jobs – such as cultivating protein crystals, monitoring microbes or investigating muscle decline –, they remember why they wanted to travel to outer space and, above all, they gaze in wonder at the unique and fragile planet.

Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, is the story of six astronauts who orbit aboard the International Space Station on a routine mission. They soon begin to ask themselves metaphysical questions about the inhabitants of the blue planet. Between science fiction and philosophical fiction, Harvey creates a literary sketch in which she demonstrates an exceptional command of a language that soon transforms into tiring poetic prose. It is true that, faced with a subject as human as life—one's own, that of others and that of everyone—perhaps the focus should have been more direct, closer, and not so based on the literary brilliance of the author. It is the same old debate: the aesthetics of words or the connection with the reader? Expression or communication?