Olivia Laing
““Among the most significant voices of our time.””
© Toby Glanville
Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They are the author of nine books, including The Lonely City (2016), Everybody (2021) and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time (2024). They are a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts, and in 2018 were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Their books have been translated into twenty-one languages.
Their first novel, Crudo, is a real-time account of the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Laing writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Financial Times and New York Times, among many other publications. They’ve written catalogue essays on a range of contemporary artists, including Derek Jarman, Christian Marclay, Agnes Martin, Tilda Swinton, Wolfgang Tillmans and Andy Warhol. They’re the author of two essay collections: Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency and Painting Writing Texting, which charts a decade of collaboration with the artist Chantal Joffe.
Their new novel, The Silver Book, was published in November 2025. It’s a queer love story and noirish thriller set in the dream factory of cinema in the 1970s, where nothing is as it seems.
Published works
