In 2021 Cheltenham Festivals announced the launch of TILA - The InWords Literary Award. This award, established by two of our life patrons, is worth £10,000 and is given annually to a writer in recognition of a novel or body of work of outstanding merit. Sarah Winman, Ali Smith and Audrey Magee are previous winners of the prize. 

This year’s winner, Samantha Harvey, has been awarded The InWords Literary Award for her latest novel, Orbital. “A wholly original gem of a novel”, Orbital follows the thoughts and actions of four astronauts and two cosmonauts working on a space station 250 miles above Earth. As the characters orbit the rotating planet, the vast serenity of the cosmos surrounds them, giving them, and us as readers, an invaluable reminder of our context.

The six characters feel “grounded”, in the best possible way, and are bound together by their shared commitment and their individual and collective vision. They have emotional tethers to the planet they see so clearly passing below them, and in some cases these ties are specific and vital.

About the author

Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, Orbital, The Western Wind, Dear Thief, All Is Song, and The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize, and one work of nonfiction, The Shapeless Unease. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize. She lives in Bath, UK, and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University.