Nitin Sawhney Turns Booker Winner Orbital into a Live Spectacle

Nitin Sawhney has transformed Samantha Harvey's Booker-winning novel Orbital into a stadium-scale live event, Orbiting Orbital, at Oxford University's Schwarzman Centre.

The commission confronts a problem Harvey's book sets up deliberately. Orbital ends in music — an ecstatic passage the Guardian's reviewer quotes as "the rin-tin-tin and jumbled tumbling of static galactic woodwind rainforest trance of a wild and lilting world". The novel imagines sound rather than prescribing it, summoning not the music of the spheres but Earth itself. Turning those invented sounds into an actual soundtrack, as the review notes, takes "a brave person". Sawhney, a multi-award-winning musician, composer and producer, took the job.

What went into the show?

The project is broad by design. According to the review, it combines:

• six new pieces of writing by Samantha Harvey
• music by Sawhney, both old and newly composed
• drawings by Antony Gormley
• photographs by Mary McCartney
• collaborations with academics working in fields as disparate as space instrumentation and ecosystem science

All of these elements meet in a single live event that the review describes as part-concert, part-symposium, part show-and-tell — then scaled up with video projections, a band, a choir and an orchestra.

Harvey won the Booker Prize for Orbital in November 2024, and the novel's prestige clearly shaped the ambition here. The Schwarzman Centre commissioned the piece, and Sawhney's collaborators give it the feel of a humanities-and-science gathering rather than a standard album tour. His signature eclectic global fusion — a mixing of musical traditions from multiple cultures — supplies the sonic framework.

What does this change for the audience?

For the reader of the novel, it offers one concrete answer to a question the book leaves open: what does that closing word-orchestra actually sound like? Sawhney's answer doesn't stay literary. It recruits Gormley's drawing and McCartney's photography as parallel responses, and lets space scientists and ecosystem researchers speak alongside the music. The format treats the novel as a hub rather than a script — every collaborator orbits it, which is presumably where the title's doubled word comes in.

The review calls the project "bewilderingly broad", and that breadth cuts both ways. A hybrid of concert, symposium and show-and-tell risks diluting each strand. But it also reflects the novel's own method: Harvey's book is a composite view of Earth assembled from many angles, and Sawhney's event borrows that structure for the stage.

Orbiting Orbital ran at the Schwarzman Centre, Oxford. Whether this model — a literary prize-winner reworked as an interdisciplinary live spectacle with visual artists and scientists attached — becomes a template for other institutions will depend on how the crossover audience responds.