Orbit by Natalie Ann Holborow

What the judge said

'Apart from being a wholly inventive and spirited evocation of a relationship, its moments of genuine sweetness and its eventual hollowing out – all sleekly delivered with self-aware assurance that pays homage to a zeitgeist while avoiding whimsicality – throughout the author excels at exposing uncanny strangenesses within the familiar' - Eley Williams

How I did it

I’ve been writing poetry seriously for over ten years and only recently got into writing short fiction. I’d been reading a lot of short stories – by people like Lucy Caldwell and Thomas Morris – and thought I’d really like to try something like that. But my first attempts were like long poems without the line breaks – I realised that writing fiction was a totally different process, and that I’d have to start from scratch learning how to do it.

The idea for this story came to me one day when I was sitting in the sun in a deckchair with a book, watching my partner mowing the lawn. He was so focused on what he was doing that I had a sudden stab of wanting him to pay me that same attention. The feeling shocked me a bit, so I leaned into it and thought about that desire to be seen and really matter to people. And I thought, what if someone wanted to be the centre of the universe?

My stories always emerge from that kind of thought process: taking a ‘what if’ idea and then asking, ‘And then what? And then what? And then what?’, like a syllogism.

I knew the partners in the story had to be women; because that kind of narcissistic ambition is rather admired in a man, but would seem absurd and unhinged in a woman. Also, I wanted to include a critique of the way women are sold a view of themselves as ‘broken’ and in need of ‘healing’ and ‘empowerment’, which involves products and therapies only the rich can afford.

The Mona character came to me fully-formed – because she was based on a wildly distorted version of me, I suppose. Laura was more difficult, because the story is written from her point of view, which meant learning what it would be like to observe Mona from the outside.

I pushed right to the end of the story in my first draft quite quickly, and ended up with a over 8,000 words in a series of messy disconnected scenes. Discovering the main themes and cutting out the rest took a lot longer. It’s nice to see the word count increasing, then going down again. But I never delete anything completely; I set it aside in case I need to work it back in later.

NATALIE ANN HOLBOROW lives in Swansea and works full-time as a content marketing manager for Synergy Learning and tutors in content marketing for NUJ Training Wales. She is also a spoken-word artist and writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She has published three collections of poetry, the most recent being Little Universe (Parthian Press, 2024), which was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. Her nonfiction book about running, Wild Running: South Wales (Seren Press), came out in September 2025.