Samantha Harvey

Harvey was born in Kent in 1975, studied philosophy, and taught for spells abroad before The Wilderness (2009) rendered Alzheimer's from the inside of a dissolving mind. Each book since has changed shape: Dear Thief, a novel-length letter to the friend who stole a husband; The Western Wind, a medieval village mystery told backwards.

The Shapeless Unease (2020) documented a year of near-total insomnia in prose pared to the nerve; Orbital was written in its wake, composed to live NASA feeds of the turning planet: six astronauts, sixteen orbits, the Earth described with a rapture the novel usually reserves for people.

At under a hundred and forty pages it became one of the shortest Booker winners ever, and the first set in space. She lives in Bath.