De jury:

‘In an unforgettable year for fiction, a book about a wounded world. Sometimes you encounter a book and cannot work out how this miraculous event has happened. As judges we were determined to find a book that moved us, a book that had capaciousness and resonance, that we are compelled to share. We wanted everything.
‘Orbital is our book. Samantha Harvey has written a novel propelled by the beauty of sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Everyone and no one is the subject, as six astronauts in the International Space Station circle the earth observing the passages of weather across the fragility of borders and time zones. With her language of lyricism and acuity Harvey makes our world strange and new for us.
‘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.’