Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing (born 14 April 1977) is a British writer and cultural critic. She won in 2018 the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and in 2019 the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel Crudo. In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Quotes

... What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don't find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us together, or trap us behind screens?
- The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. Macmillan. March 2016. p. 5. ISBN 978-1-250-03957-6.

At the age of 39 I was fairly sure I would spend the rest of my life alone. I lived alone, I worked alone. No matter what I did, or who I dated, I didn’t seem to be able to find the relationship I longed for. ...
Ian was nearly three decades older than me, but all the same we quickly became friends. We were both passionate gardeners, and we’d take tours around our patches, pointing out the plants we were most proud of. ...
We didn’t just love each other. We were in love with each other. We were the foundation of each other’s lives. We decided to get married that summer. Suddenly there was no time to waste. ...
... I used to worry I’d never meet anyone and now I live in terror of Ian’s death. He’s the same age as my parents; I know it’s likely that I’ll lose them all at around the same time, a loss so cataclysmic I can barely begin to fathom it. I worry about my sweet husband vanishing into the blind alleys of dementia. I worry about blood clots, bowel cancer, a heart attack, a stroke.
- (June 24, 2018)"Olivia Laing, the acclaimed author of The Lonely City, on loneliness, marrying the poet Ian Patterson and the challenge of intimacy". The Sunday Times.

... If you're a writer who works in biographies, you discover that that the people you're writing about aren't very nice. Not always. Sometimes they're wonderful.
- Biles, Adam, ed (5 October 2023). "Chapter. Olivia Lang The Lonely City Tuesday 14th June 2016 (interview conducted by Adam Biles)". The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews. Canongate Books. ISBN 978-1-80530-004-5.

… If some of England’s seemingly sublime gardens were economically dependent on the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of America and the West Indies, others were contingent upon the practice of parliamentary enclosure, the legal process of taking the formerly open fields, commons and wasteland of the medieval period into private ownership.
- "Safe haven or symbol of injustice? What our gardens tell us about the world we live in". The Guardian. 27 April 2024. (edited extract from The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing, published by Picador on April 25, 2024)