Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They’re the author of eight books, including Funny Weather, Everybody and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Laing’s first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2018 they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. They’re an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts and their books have been translated into twenty-one languages. Their latest novel is The Silver Book.
@olivialanguage | olivialaing.com
“How art helped me see the beauty in loneliness…” An edited extract of The Lonely City
Olivia Laing
The Guardian
“To the River is a constant delight: dreamy and lyrical, meditative and wry… A beautiful - and beautifully written - book, every bit as enchanting as its watery subject.”
Stephanie Cross
The Lady
“Darkness had completely descended onto the landscape and I stood up and stretched my arms above my head and I wondered what it would be like if it were a perfect world. Only god knows. And he is dead”
“A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads”
“Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost”
‘It is exhilarating to witness this method operating in non-fiction too. Stitching and collaging odd fragments and genres together, Laing goes beyond reparation to offer something beautifully integrated, original, compassionate. She does not pose as a professional expert; her very subjectivity, her own suffering, confer her authority because they are so enmeshed with her powerful intelligence’
Michele Roberts
The Independent
“You might not be familiar with the American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz’s name, but if you’re of a certain age, you have probably seen at least one image by him. His photograph of buffalo tumbling off a cliff was used as the cover of U2’s One, taking his art to a global audience a few months before his death in 1992 of Aids-related complications.”
Olivia Laing
Guardian
