Olivia Laing

Private Passions

Olivia Laing has won prizes and critical acclaim for her books, but readily admits that she led quite a wild life before becoming a writer: she dropped out of university, lived in a treehouse on an anti-road protest and later trained and worked as a herbalist.

Her non-fiction books include The Trip to Echo Spring, which examined how writers who were damagingly addicted to alcohol could still produce great literature. She drew on her own experience of extreme loneliness in New York to write The Lonely City, which blended memoir with reflections on the works of artists including Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol.

Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times bestseller and won the James Tait Memorial Prize.

And most recently she’s written The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. It’s an account of how she’s restoring a walled garden in Suffolk - and an investigation into the history of gardens and the solace and pleasure they can bring.

Olivia's music choices include Puccini, Purcell, Wagner and Bach.