Olivia Laing Books in Order

Olivia Laing is a British writer and cultural critic who grew up in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire. They have built a career around questions that resist tidy categories: how people live in bodies, how art helps or fails us, and how a place carries its past. Their books move between memoir, history, biography, criticism, travel, and fiction, while keeping a close eye on ordinary human feeling.

Laing studied English at the University of Sussex but left before finishing, spending part of their early twenties involved in environmental protest and living in the Sussex countryside. It was an unconventional start, and it gave them experiences they have returned to when writing about landscape, politics, and the pressure to live a conventional life.

Before publishing books, Laing trained and worked as a medical herbalist. They later moved into book journalism and served as deputy books editor at the Observer from 2007 to 2009. When that job ended during recession-era cuts, writing a book became less a distant ambition and more the next practical step.

The change stuck.

Their first book, To the River, came out in 2011. Laing walks the River Ouse in Sussex, the river where Virginia Woolf died, using the journey to connect water, memory, local history, and Woolf's life. Readers who enjoy a book that wanders with purpose will recognize a lasting pattern: Laing starts with a real place, then lets it open into larger questions.

The Trip to Echo Spring takes a tougher route, traveling through the lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. It looks closely at alcoholism and creative work, without turning either suffering or drink into a romantic story. The book also carries Laing's personal knowledge of addiction in a family.

Then came The Lonely City, written out of time spent living alone in New York. Laing approaches loneliness through artists including Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, asking what isolation does to a person and how contact can still be made. It is part city book, part art history, and part record of trying to get through a difficult stretch.

Art is never just background in Laing's work.

The essay collection Funny Weather gathers their writing on painters, musicians, writers, politics, technology, and emergency. Everybody turns to bodily freedom, following people who fought to define how bodies can be seen, treated, desired, and controlled. In The Garden Against Time, restoring a walled Suffolk garden leads into questions about paradise, property, exclusion, and shared forms of life.

Laing has also written fiction. Crudo is a fast, unsettled novel set in the summer of 2017, where a figure called Kathy tries to make sense of marriage amid a frightening news cycle. Their second novel, The Silver Book, heads to 1970s Italy, bringing a young artist into the film world in the period before Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder. In 2018, Laing received the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, and Crudo won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2019. They are non-binary and use they/them pronouns. Alongside their books, Laing has continued to write about art and artists, returning again and again to the messy exchange between private feeling and public life.