Olivia Laing at Manchester Central Library

We’re loving that this year we don’t have to wait until October to welcome great writers to Manchester Literature Festival, and one we’re really looking forward to in the new spring programme is “accidental literary grande dame” (New York Magazine) Olivia Laing, according to The Observer “simply one of our most exciting writers”.

Previously commissioned by MLF as writer-in-residence at the Midland Hotel, Olivia Laing returns to Manchester to talk about her latest book, The Garden Against Time. Back in the very Laingian realm of non-fiction, this compelling new work brings to life the restoration of a garden designed by Mark Rumary of Notcutts. Referencing the work of Derek Jarman, WG Sebald, John Milton, John Clare, William Morris and others, she explores the idea of paradise and gardens, both real and imagined. “A garden is a time capsule, as well as a portal out of time”, we’re told, and she considers how gardens are political – private land versus public space, for example – and “how these slices of Eden survive war, offer a place for rebel outposts and communal utopias, and bring joy during difficult times”.

A regular creative non-fiction dabbler, Olivia Laing is the author of seven books including 2021’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Picador) and 2020’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, which collates her essays about art and culture written over the span of her career so far, offering up a collection that examines the pivotal role that art plays in our political and emotional lives.

Her third book The Lonely City: Adventures In The Art Of Being Alone (Canongate) was shortlisted for the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, while her second, The Trip To Echo Spring: On Writers And Drinking, (she likes a long title) was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award and the Gordon Burn Prize, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2014. These were preceded by To The River: A Journey Beneath the Surface, tracking the Ouse, where Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. 

A widely acclaimed author and critic, her writing about art and culture appears in the Guardian, Financial Times and frieze, among many other publications, and she has written extensively about writers, art and creativity, including essays and forewords on Virginia Woolf, David Wojnarowicz, Cookie Mueller, Chantal Joffe and Wolfgang Tillmans. In 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.

Cast your mind back to 2018 and you may recall that Olivia Laing’s experimental real-time short novel, Crudo, all about food and love was on everyone’s lips. Written in just seven weeks, and started while on holiday in Tuscany, this was Laing’s debut prose book, and it became a Sunday Times bestseller and winner of the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize.

Presented in partnership with the Centre for New Writing and Creative Manchester, this event is hosted by Greg Thorpe.