Lavinia Greenlaw – författare

A powerful, involving new novel, following on from the author’s much-praised debut novel ‘Mary George of Allnorthover’.‘An Irresponsible Age’, Lavinia Greenlaw's extraordinary new novel, is set in London in 1990, with Thatcher still in power but the country unwilling to 'abandon an idea just because it proved to be a bad one'. In these hesitant times we follow the life of Juliet Clough and her three siblings, all of them interdependent in a not-quite enviable way, clinging together after the death of a brother and the retreat of their grieving parents. When Juliet, the focus of them all, is drawn into a complex love affair with the enigmatic Jacob, the others, too, find themselves falling in love, and then evading the consequences. None will admit what they are doing, or why.

Lavinia Greenlaw’s mesmerising debut novel about growing up in the surreal banality of mid-’70s Essex.Lavinia Greenlaw puts before us the monochrome, immemorial middle England of the 1970s in all its dowdy glory, and has us see through the mercurial, bewitching Mary George’s eyes how a seemingly static landscape is suddenly illuminated by the most vivid bursts of energy, colour and drama. Punk’s torch flares into life and singes the fringes of England. Mary George bears witness and burns brighter still: she is more memorable than even the extraordinary events around her, and the reader will find it devastatingly hard to leave her company at the end of this exceptional debut about growing up under the shadow of an unknowable, inescapable small-town mystery.

An original poetic work that brings alive Chaucer's great love story, illuminating the psychological drama at its heart.

A POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATIONMinsk, Lavinia Greenlaw's third collection, was shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. From London Zoo to an Essex village and the Arctic Circle, Greenlaw explores questions of place - the childhood landscapes we leave behind, those we travel towards, and those like 'Minsk' which we believe to be missing from our lives. Greenlaw's restless, inquisitive tone builds to make Minsk a hypnotic collection from one of the leading poets of her generation.

If Lavinia Greenlaw's Minsk was about home, her new collection tests the proximities of elsewhere, 'the circle round our house', the road between two lives. Its title recalls a phrase of Robert Lowell's to describe Elizabeth Bishop -- one of the book's presiding spirits, with her insistence on the provisional, on the moment in which perception is formed, on landscape as action rather than description. The Casual Perfect continues Lavinia Greenlaw's explorations of light and the borders of vision, which include a journey to the four corners of Britain to observe the solstices and equinoxes, and a cycle about the East Anglian landscape which is nine-tenths sky. Questions of travel hover around many of these poems, or questions which need to be 'travelled fully' rather than answered -- and which involve the overheard and the glimpsed, what is gleaned from traces and external signs. The result is a collection that is under-stated, spare but inclusive, which invites our presence as readers.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award.When Chaucer composed Troilus and Criseyde he gave us, some say, his finest poem, and with it one of the most captivating love stories ever written. A Double Sorrow, Lavinia Greenlaw's new work, takes its title from the opening line of that poem in a fresh telling of this most tortured of love affairs.Set against the Siege of Troy, A Double Sorrow is the story of Trojan hero Troilus and his beloved Criseyde, whose traitorous father has defected to the Greeks and has persuaded them to ask for his daughter in an exchange of prisoners. In an attempt to save her, Troilus suggests that Criseyde flees the besieged city with him, but she knows that she will be universally condemned and looks instead to a temporary measure: pretending to submit to the exchange, while promising Troilus that she will return to him within ten days. But once in the company of the Greeks she soon realises the impossibility of her promise to Troilus, and in despair succumbs to another.Lavinia Greenlaw's pinpoint retelling of this heart-wrenching tale is neither a translation nor strictly a 'version' of Chaucer's work, but instead creates something new: a sequence of glimpses from the medieval poem that refine the psychological drama of the classical story through a process of detonation or amplification of image and phrase into original poems. In a series of skillfully crafted seven-line vignettes, the author creates a zoetrope that serves to illuminate the intensity with which these characters argue each other and themselves into and out of love. The result is a breathtaking and shattering read -contemporary and timeless - that builds into an unforgettable telling of this most heartbreaking of love stories.

Galileo's wife, a young woman dying of radium poisoning, the first dog in space, a strangely obsessed concert pianist, an early beneficiary of plastic surgery, and a Russian boy whose adventures are sadly limited by the immature powers of the child who has conjured him up are just some of the figures encompassed by Lavinia Greenlaw's imagination.The poet's level gaze as she contemplates the more bizarre aspects of science and of human behaviour lends further distinction to this, her first collection.

Lavinia Greenlaw's first collection, Night Photograph, made an immediately favourable impact. Her second collection, A World Where News Travelled Slowly explores more local and personal matters. Its central theme is the unpredictable act of communication, from the mechanical to the miraculous. There are also poems that are concerned with attempts at preservation - plundered relics, the stately home, an iron lung. This volume serves to confirm the gifts Lavinia Greenlaw showed in her first book.

If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway . . . the music attracted and repelled, organised and disturbed and then let us into the night, clusters of emotion ready to dissolve into sleep.In The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into: getting drunk, falling in love, dying of boredom, cutting our hair, terrifying our parents, wanting to change the world. This is a vivid memoir unlike any other, recalling the furious passion of being young, female, and coming alive through music.

Iris, a museum conservator in her late forties, is separating from her husband while bringing up two daughters.Raif is a stalled academic, as uncertain of the past as he is of the future, whose girlfriend is about to move in with him. When Iris and Raif first meet by chance, Iris suddenly turns away and starts to run. She is running from what this encounter has woken in her.In the City of Love's Sleep is a contemporary story about what it means to fall in love in middle age. It charts the steps two people take towards one another and what it means to have taken those steps before.

Lavinia Greenlaw's last collection, The Casual Perfect (2011), focused on 'the achievement of the provisional'. The Built Moment explores what we build out of the provisional: beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures, and the moments we fix as memories, fixing too their joy and pain.The first section, 'The Sea is an Edge and an Ending', is a sequence of poems about her father's dementia and his disappearance into the present tense. It is not a narrative of illness so much as a meditation on the metaphysics of memory and loss. What does it mean to exist only in the present, for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free? The second section, 'The Bluebell Horizontal', looks towards possibility, and proposes new frameworks in the face of loss. It includes a prayer, a blessing and a speculation on why we cling on to pain. There are structures that arrest remembering and forgetting, and the fundamental arrest of a poet's difficulty with words.The Built Moment masterfully demonstrates how, as we get older and death becomes more a part of life, what we build and what we break out of become more important than ever.

'[Greenlaw] wields her erudition lightly.' Sunday Times'Remarkable, visionary.' CELIA PAUL'Indescribably brilliant.' Daily Telegraph'Kaleidoscopic.' Guardian'A rare pleasure . . . rewarding and thought-provoking.' Irish TimesFrom the celebrated poet, novelist and memoirist, The Vast Extent is a constellation of "exploded essays" about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages and scientific scrutiny with a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other.In this original and illuminating work, Lavinia Greenlaw invites us to observe our world and beyond with a new sensitivity.

'A pointed, svelte but diverse work.' Irish TimesPart memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is an elegant, important and spirited work of self-investigation; the result of decades of answering questions that don't really matter-and not being asked the ones that do.'A delight: approachable, rigorous and omnivorous in its frame of reference. . . a timely, lyrical investigation into what it means to create.' Observer

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALCOTT PRIZEThis Selected Poems offers the perfect introduction to a distinguished body of work that has established Lavinia Greenlaw as one of the most perceptive and original poets of her generation. From her arresting debut, Night Photograph (1993), through five further collections, the poems reflect a lifelong preoccupation with perception: how we describe what we see or envisage what we can't see, and how we locate ourselves in place and time and in relation to one another. The selection also documents a poet moving through life from young love and early parenthood to the years of uncertainty, endurance, reflection and loss. The book comes to rest on The Built Moment (2019) with its heart-breaking sequence about her father's dementia and what it means to disappear into the present tense. Yet even here we are shown that among the broken and the fragmented, the provisional and the changeable, there is always something left from which to build. '. . . the sensuousness of her thought and her ability to move between the abstract and the precisely observed remain as potent as ever.' William Wotton, Guardian'. . . a poet who is pushing for a style that is taut, elliptical and which is uncompromising in its desire to forge a voice that is curious and open to change, however disorienting, painful and delightful such transitions might be.' Deryn Rees-Jones, Independent'Everything Greenlaw touches glitters and resonates, her discipline and skill allowing her to be serious, soulful, knockabout, funny and downright strange in the course of a few lines.' Glyn Maxwell, Vogue

A book that uses poetry to talk about difficulty, and vice versaAs Lavinia Greenlaw readily admits, 'The idea of poetry tends to make people feel stupid, anxious or bored.' Poetry can appear to be inherently 'difficult'; our immediate impulse, to baulk or turn away. But in this wonderfully lucid investigation, Greenlaw invites us to do the opposite: to dwell with her in the uneasiness of difficulty.She looks at why we might both crave and fear difficulty, how we use and perform it, how our relationship to it might expose habits of thought and approach that can be productively dismantled. By entertaining the possibility of difficulty, she argues, we might allow ourselves to get more truthfully at what it is we really need to say.With characteristic poise and clarity, and using plentiful examples, Greenlaw turns over moments of opacity and resistance to show us how difficulty might in fact contain its own solution.

Morris's intimate journals, written for a friend, unconsciously explore questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you've never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw draws out these questions as she follows in the footprints of Morris's prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

Morris's intimate journals, written for a friend, unconsciously explore questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you've never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. Poet Lavinia Greenlaw draws out these questions as she follows in the footprints of Morris's prose, responding to its surfaces and undercurrents, extending its horizons. The result is a new and composite work, which brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.

'Remarkable . . . People will be inspired by it to look again at the world and its mysteries.' CELIA PAULAn expansive, wonder-filled collection exploring art, science and travel From the celebrated poet, novelist and memoirist, The Vast Extent is a constellation of "exploded essays" about light and image, seeing and the unseen. Each is a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge, aligning art, myth, strange voyages, scientific scrutiny and a poet's response so that they cast light upon each other. Ranging across caves, seasickness, early photography, boredom, wonder, mountains, mice, the body and its shadow, from the Arctic at midwinter to a shingle spit in Norfolk at midsummer, Lavinia Greenlaw invites us to travel such questions as how we might describe what we have never seen before or what helps us to see more clearly or persuades us to see what's not there. Art, science, technology, vision and memory inform one another in this original and illuminating work.'[Greenlaw] wields her erudition lightly.' Sunday Times