Introducing the 2026-2027 Common Book
KU Reads 2026-2027 Selection
Orbital is the 2026 - 2027 academic year KU Reads selection! Copies are currently available only to KU faculty and instructors. Student copies will become available in the Fall 2026 semester.Faculty and Instructors, request your copy below.
Samantha Harvey
Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels and one work of non-fiction. Her latest novel, Orbital, takes place on a space station and is an account of a single 24-hour day in low earth orbit. Orbital won the Booker Prize 2024 and the Hawthornden Prize, and is nominated for the Orwell Prize and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.Her other novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Baileys Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the HWA Gold Crown Award. The Western Wind won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize, and The Wilderness was the winner of the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize.
She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in the UK.
