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Olivia Laing

Biography

Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction.

She is the author of TO THE RIVER, THE TRIP TO ECHO SPRING and THE LONELY CITY, which has been translated into 17 languages and sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. She has written an essay collection, FUNNY WEATHER: Art in an Emergency, and her latest book is EVERYBODY: A Book About Freedom.

Her first novel, CRUDO, is a real-time account of the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top 10 bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2018, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2019 it won the 100th James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Laing’s writing about art and culture appears in the Guardian, Financial Times and frieze, among many other publications.

Olivia Laing

Books by Olivia Laing

by Olivia Laing - Biography, Cultural Studies, Memoir, Nonfiction

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism and the civil rights movement. Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century --- among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Malcolm X.

by Olivia Laing - Art, Culture, Nonfiction

FUNNY WEATHER brings together a career’s worth of Olivia Laing’s writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We’re often told that art can’t change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers fertile new ways of living.

by Olivia Laing - Fiction

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017, and the whole world is falling apart. CRUDO unfolds in real time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker. From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her 40s adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is heating up, and Trump is tweeting the world ever-closer to nuclear war. How do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?

by Olivia Laing - Cultural Studies, Memoir, Nonfiction

When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-30s, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between works and lives --- from Edward Hopper's Nighthawks to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to David Wojnarowicz's AIDS activism --- Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone.

by Olivia Laing - Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Writing

In THE TRIP TO ECHO SPRING, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work.