The Making of Orbiting Orbital

The Making of Orbiting Orbital is on at the Schwarzman Centre on Saturday 7 November, a talk that pulls back the curtain on the collaboration behind Orbiting Orbital. It's led by Professor Yadvinder Malhi, and he's joined on stage by Samantha Harvey, Nitin Sawhney, and Alexandra Mitsotaki.

The story starts with Orbital, the novel Samantha Harvey wrote that won the Booker Prize in 2024. Nitin Sawhney was one of the judges that year, and he felt compelled to write music inspired by it. Two years on, Orbiting Orbital arrived as the result of a deep collaboration between artists, academics, archaeologists, and the planet itself. The sacred island of Delos in Greece—the mythological birthplace of Apollo, Artemis, and light—sits at the centre of the journey.

That's the thread the talk unpicks: how a Booker-winning novel turned into a musical response, and how that grew into a wider project involving archaeology and the landscape of Delos. With the original collaborators all in the room, you'll hear about the process from the people who actually did the work rather than just reading about it in a review. It's the kind of thing that's far more interesting when you can hear the different voices—the writer, the composer, the academic—talking through how they worked together.

It runs in the Cinema at the Schwarzman Centre in Oxford, starting at 14:00 and lasting an hour and a half with no interval. It's recommended for ages 14 and over.