Loneliness, landscape, embodiment, art and freedom: the themes present in Olivia Laing's (United Kingdom) works are interwoven with a sharp and deeply empathetic gaze, resisting categorisation. Through titles such as The Lonely City or The Garden Against Time, Laing has built a body of literaturee that invites us to think from within the margins, to pause and look at things from a different perspective.
Crudo, Laing's first novel, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and, in 2018, Laing received the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Apart from their books, Olivia Laing writes about art and culture for The Guardian, Financial Times and The New York Times, among other publications. They’ve written catalogue essays on a variety of contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Wolfgang Tillmans and Chantal Joffe. Their collected essays on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, was published in 2020. Coming up is their new book, The Silver Book, which will be published this November and will be a queer love story and a noirish thriller set in the dream factory of Italian cinema in the 1970s.
To mark the 20th anniversary of La Noche de los Libros in Madrid, on 25 April at 20:15, Olivia Laing will share the stage at the Real Casa de Correos with Spanish author Edurne Portela in a conversation titled Literature as a Way of Seeing. Together, they will explore Laing’s work and reflect on writing as a refuge, an act of resistance, and a search for meaning. Join us in this space where we can take a break and observe the world through literature.
Admission will be free until full capacity is reached.
Find the full programme here.