Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw (born 30 July 1962) is an English poet and novelist. Her most recent work is A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde, which was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award in 2014.

Biography

Greenlaw was born in London into a family of doctors and scientists, but in 1973 when she was eleven years old, her family moved from London to a village in Essex. She has described the seven years there as "an interim time", with "memories of time being arrested, nothing much happening." She read modern arts at Kingston Polytechnic, studied at the London College of Printing and has an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute. She has worked as an editor at Imperial College of Science and Technology and for the publishers Allison and Busby and subsequently Earthscan. She also worked as an arts administrator for the London Arts Board and the South Bank Centre.

In 1994 she embarked upon a career as a freelance artist, critic and radio broadcaster. She has been writer in residence at the Science Museum, reader in residence at the Royal Festival Hall, and poet in residence at a firm of solicitors in London. In 2013 she was awarded an Engagement Fellowship by the Wellcome Trust.

Her sound work, Audio Obscura, was commissioned in 2011 from Artangel and Manchester International Festival, and won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry.

She lives in London and currently works as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She was a judge for the 2010 Manchester Poetry Prize. In 2014 she was chair of the judging panel for the inaugural Folio Prize.

Writing

Primarily a poet, Greenlaw has also written novels, short stories, plays and non-fiction. She has made documentaries for radio, and her work for music includes the libretto for Peter Pan (Staatsoper Stuttgart/Komische Oper Berlin/Welsh National Opera and Royal Opera House, 2015, composer Richard Ayres). Publications for which she has written include the London Review of Books, The Guardian and The New Yorker, among others.

Her work is heavily informed by her interest in science and scientific enquiry, and by themes of displacement, loss and belonging. Critics have noted that her poetry is remarkable in its precision, and that her best poems contain a complexity and elusiveness that lead them to "appreciate with each re-reading".

Awards and recognition

Lavinia Greenlaw received an Eric Gregory Award in 1990, an Arts Council Writers' Award in 1995, a Cholmondeley Award and a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship. In 1994 she was also chosen as one of the 20 New Generation Poets.

Her work has been shortlisted for a number of literary awards, including the Whitbread Book Award (now known as the Costa Book Awards) and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her short story "We Are Watching Something Terrible Happening" was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2013.

She won the French Prix du Premier Roman for her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover, and, most notably, the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for "A World Where News Travelled Slowly", the title poem from her second major collection.

Selected works

• The Cost of Getting Lost in Space (poetry), Turret Books, 1991
• Love from a Foreign City (poetry), Slow Dancer Press, 1992, ISBN 978-1-871033-18-2
• Night Photograph (poetry; shortlisted for Whitbread and Forward Poetry Prizes), Faber and Faber, 1993, ISBN 978-0-571-16894-1
• A World Where News Travelled Slowly (poetry), Faber and Faber, 1997
• Mary George of Allnorthover (novel; Prix du Premier Roman Etranger), Flamingo, 9 July 2001, ISBN 978-0-618-09523-0
• Minsk (poetry; shortlisted for T. S. Eliot, Forward and Whitbread Poetry Prizes), Faber and Faber, 2003, ISBN 978-0-571-22271-1
• Thoughts of a Night Sea (photographs by Garry Fabian Miller), Merrell, 2003
• An Irresponsible Age (novel), Fourth Estate, 2006, ISBN 978-0-00-715629-0
• The Importance of Music to Girls (non-fiction), Faber and Faber, 2007, ISBN 978-0-375-17454-4
• The Casual Perfect (poetry), Faber and Faber, 2011, ISBN 978-0-571-27816-9
• Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland (non-fiction), Notting Hill Editions, 2011, ISBN 978-190790318-2.
• Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (poetry), Faber & Faber, 2014, ISBN 978-0-571-28454-2.

Television

Greenlaw appeared as a "talking head" on the BBC documentaries Top of the Pops: The Story of 1976. (2011) and The Joy of the Single. (2012).

External links

• Lavinia Greenlaw website.
• Lavinia Greenlaw on Twitter
• Lavinia Greenlaw at FSG
• Lavinia Greenlaw at the Poetry Archive. Retrieved 26 October 2011.
• Charlotte Runcie, "Something borrowed, something blue" (interview), The Telegraph, 23 February 2014.