Winner of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction, Olivia Laing is the author of The Lonely City, a book exploring the connection between isolation and creativity; Echo Spring, which examines the link between creativity and alcohol; and To the River, a reflection on the river in Sussex that Virginia Wolf drowned in.

In 2018 she became a Sunday Times top ten bestselling author with Crudo, her first fictional novel about love during an apocalypse from the perspective of someone who may or may not be punk writer Kathy Acker. 

Director Barbara Anastacio visited Laing in her home in Cambridge, which she shares with her husband and British poet Ian Patterson. If you zig-zag around a table covered in papers, circle the cozy corner kitchen, and step past a fluorescent pink poster-poem by Christopher Logue, visitors will eventually be rewarded with enrapturing views of Laing’s garden.

You’re just as likely to find yourself lost among Laing’s Nerines, purple Dahlias, Pelargoniums, and Silver Parrot Tulips as you are to thumb through the leaves of a Derek Jarman book or Fernando Pessoa opine.

Laing’s Cambridgeshire home is a labor of love between the two wordsmiths whose worlds and inspirations collide in a confluence of petals, poetry and a healthy dash of Andy Warhol iconography. 

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, a collection of essays by Laing on political turbulence in the twenty-first century, will be published on 2 April 2020