Olivia Laing (born 14 April 1977) is a British writer, novelist and cultural critic. She is the author of four works of non-fiction, ''To the River'', ''The Trip to Echo Spring,'' '' The Lonely City'', and ''Everybody'', as well as an essay collection, ''Funny Weather'', and a novel, ''

Crudo In Italian language, Italian, ''crudo'' means "raw". In Italian cuisine, this word can be used with a lot of food: ''pesce crudo'' means "raw fish", and ''carne cruda'' means "raw meat", similar to steak tartare. See also * Kinilaw * Ceviche ...

.'' In 2018, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and in 2019, the 100th

James Tait Black Memorial Prize The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Unit ...

for ''Crudo''. In 2019 she became an elected Fellow of the

Royal Society of Literature The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) is a learned society founded in 1820, by George IV of the United Kingdom, King George IV, to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". A charity that represents the voice of literature in the UK, th ...

Early life and education

Olivia Laing grew up in

Chalfont St. Peter Chalfont St Peter is a large village and civil parish in southeastern Buckinghamshire, England. It is in a group of villages called The Chalfonts which also includes Chalfont St Giles and Little Chalfont. The villages lie between High Wycombe ...

Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire (), abbreviated Bucks, is a ceremonial county in South East England that borders Greater London to the south-east, Berkshire to the south, Oxfordshire to the west, Northamptonshire to the north, Bedfordshire to the north-ea ...

.''Biography''
British Council, Literature. Retrieved 27-06-18. She enrolled at Sussex University to study English, but dropped out to live on a road protest in Dorset. At the age of 20, she spent three months living alone on an abandoned farm near Brighton, an experience she has described as being formative. In her twenties, Laing trained as a medical herbalist.

Career

Between 2007 and 2009, Laing was Deputy Books Editor of ''

The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the w ...

''. She writes on art and culture for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', ''frieze'' and ''

New Statesman The ''New Statesman'' is a British political and cultural magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other leading members ...

'' and has written catalogue essays for many contemporary artists, including

Derek Jarman Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman (31 January 1942 – 19 February 1994) was an English artist, film maker, costume designer, stage designer, writer, gardener and gay rights activist. Biography Jarman was born at the Royal Victoria Nursing Home ...

Chantal Joffe Chantal Joffe (born 5 October 1969) is an American-born English artist based in London.Royal Academy of ArtsChantal Joffe RA Elect , Artist , Royal Academy of Arts accessdate: 29/08/2014 Her often large-scale paintings generally depict women ...

Wolfgang Tillmans Wolfgang Tillmans (born 16 August 1968) is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations. Tillmans was the first photog ...

and

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...

. Laing is the author of four books of nonfiction, each mixing cultural criticism and memoir with elements of biography,

psychoanalysis PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might b ...

, and travel writing. Her first book, ''To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface'', was published in 2011. Walking the length of the Ouse, the river in which

Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born i ...

drowned in 1941, Laing reflects upon Woolf's life and work and, more generally, upon the relationship between history and place, and the difficulties of biography. The book was shortlisted for the

Ondaatje Prize The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize is an annual literary award given by the Royal Society of Literature. The £10,000 award is for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry that evokes the "spirit of a place", and is written by someon ...

and the

Dolman Best Travel Book Award The Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards celebrate the best travel writing and travel writers in the world. The awards include the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year and the Edward Stanford Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing ...

. ''The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking'' (2013), a finalist for both the Costa Biography Award and the

Gordon Burn Prize Gordon Burn (16 January 1948 – 17 July 2009) was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction. Background Burn's novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity as l ...

, employs a similar tack. Travelling across America, Laing explores the difficult relationship between creativity and alcoholism, placing her own experience growing up in an alcoholic family alongside the lives of male alcoholic writers such as

John Cheever John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularize ...

Raymond Carver Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. He contributed to the revitalization of the American short story during the 1980s. Early life Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mi ...

and

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fic ...

. In the book, she praises literature's "power to map the more difficult regions of human experience and knowledge". According to the judges of the Windham-Campbell Prize, "this power to map the difficult, the shameful, and the grotesque, as well as the beautiful and transcendent, is inherent in her own work". Her third book, '' The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone'', was aided by research Laing undertook as a recipient of the 2014 Eccles British Library Writer Award''The two winners of the 2014 Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award are announced''
British Library, October 29, 2013. Retrieved 27-06-18. and was published in 2016. It was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the

National Book Critics Circle Award The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English". Examining her own experience of solitude during a period living in New York, Laing considers how the culturally stigmatised condition of loneliness provides new insights into the work of numerous artists for whom the creative act became a means of exploring solitude and forging companionship, among them

Edward Hopper Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Hopper created subdued drama ...

Henry Darger Henry Joseph Darger Jr. (; April 12, 1892 – April 13, 1973) was an American writer, novelist and artist who worked as a hospital custodian in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page fantasy novel ma ...

and

David Wojnarowicz David Michael Wojnarowicz ( (September 14, 1954 – July 22, 1992) was an American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter/recording artist, and AIDS activist prominent in the East Village art scene. He incorp ...

. The result is a merging of inner and outer realities, a revelatory exploration of the intense feelings of shame that loneliness can provoke as well as a vivid portrait of 1970s and 1980s New York at the peak of the

AIDS crisis The AIDS epidemic, caused by HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), found its way to the United States between the 1970s and 1980s, but was first noticed after doctors discovered clusters of Kaposi's sarcoma and pneumocystis pneumonia in homosexu ...

. Laing's first novel, ''Crudo'', is a roman-à-clef about the politically turbulent summer of 2017. Written in real time over seven weeks, the novel is also an homage to

Kathy Acker Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947 isputed– November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trau ...

, on whom the protagonist is based. It was a ''New York Times'' Notable Book of 2018, and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize. In 2019, ''Crudo'' won the 100th

. According to the fiction judge, Dr Alex Lawrie: "This is fiction at its finest: a bold and reactive political novel that captures a raw slice of contemporary history with pace, charm, and wit." Writing in ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'', Alexandra Schwartz described ''Crudo'' as "a work of

autofiction In literary criticism, autofiction is a form of fictionalized autobiography. Autofiction combines two mutually inconsistent narrative forms, namely autobiography and fiction. An author may decide to recount their life in the third person, to mod ...

that captures the apprehension of the present moment." In ''

'',

Sarah Ditum Sarah Ditum is an English opinion columnist and freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications including ''The Guardian'', ''New Statesman, The Times'', and ''UnHerd''. She is based in Bath, Somerset, Bath. Ditum's writing has covered i ...

wrote that Laing "uses her style like a magician uses sleight-of-hand, palming away a hinted-at revelation while your attention has been directed towards the dazzling arc of her sentences". ''Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency'' was published in 2020. It is a collection of essays, reviews and other published work that Laing wrote for a variety of publications including ''

frieze In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...

BOMB A bomb is an explosive weapon that uses the Exothermic process, exothermic reaction of an explosive material to provide an extremely sudden and violent release of energy. Detonations inflict damage principally through ground- and atmosphere-t ...

'' and ''

''. Laing's sixth book, ''Everybody'', examines the body and its discontents by way of the renegade psychoanalyst

Wilhelm Reich Wilhelm Reich ( , ; 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian Doctor of Medicine, doctor of medicine and a psychoanalysis, psychoanalyst, along with being a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author ...

. It explores the liberation movements of the twentieth century, examining the work and lives of a variety of figures, including

Nina Simone Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), known professionally as Nina Simone (), was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, folk, gospel, blues, ...

Susan Sontag Susan Sontag (; January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer, philosopher, and political activist. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her ...

Andrea Dworkin Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 – April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo ...

and

Malcolm X Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the civil rights movement. A spokesman for the Nation of Is ...

. According to the ''

Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and published digitally that focuses on business and economic current affairs. Based in London, England, the paper is owned by a Japanese holding company, Nik ...

'', "Laing's gift for weaving big ideas together with lyrical prose sets her alongside the likes of Arundhati Roy, John Berger and James Baldwin. In other words, she is among the most significant voices of our time."

Personal life

Laing is married to the poet and academic Ian Patterson. She identifies as trans/non-binary.

Awards and honors

*2014 Eccles British Library Writers Award *2018 Windham–Campbell Literature PrizeCummings, Mike
''Yale awards eight writers $165,000 Windham-Campbell Prizes''
March 7, 2018. Retrieved 27-06-18. *2019

- ''Crudo''

Publications

Non-fiction

* ''To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface'' (Canongate, 2011) *''The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking'' (Canongate, 2013) *'' The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone'' (Canongate, 2016) *''Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency'' (Picador, 2020) *''Everybody: A Book About Freedom'' (Picador, 2021)

Fiction

*''

'' (Picador, 2018)

References

External links

Author website

ft.com

''Guardian'' review of ''Crudo''

''New Statesman'' review of ''The Lonely City''

''Observer'' review of ''The Trip to Echo Spring''

An interview with Olivia Laing, buzzfeed
{{DEFAULTSORT:Laing, Olivia 1977 births Living people 21st-century British novelists 21st-century British non-fiction writers New Statesman people People from Chalfont St Peter James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature