Lavinia Greenlaw

Meeting with writers from the UK in All-Russia State Library for Foreign Literature. Glyn Maxwell, Denis Beznosov, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jay Bernard.

Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London into a medical and scientific family,[4] and is one of two sisters and two brothers.[5] When she was aged 11 the family moved from London to an Essex village, where they lived for seven years.[6][5] This period Greenlaw has described as "an interim time" with "memories of time being arrested, nothing much happening."

Greenlaw went on to read modern arts at Kingston Polytechnic. She then studied at the London College of Printing and gained an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute. She was employed as an editor at Imperial College of Science and Technology (1985–1986) and with the publishers Allison and Busby (1986–1987),[7][8] and subsequently with Earthscan (1988–90).[9] She also worked as an arts administrator for Southbank Centre (1990–1991) and the London Arts Board (1991–1994).

Greenlaw's career as a freelance artist, critic and broadcaster began in 1994.[10] She became the first artist-in-residence at the Science Museum (1994–1995),[11] and has since held residences at the Royal Festival Hall, at a London solicitors' firm (1997–1998),[7][9] and at the Royal Society of Medicine (2004).[12] In 2013 she won an Engagement Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust.[13] Her sound work Audio Obscura was commissioned in 2011 by Artangel and Manchester International Festival,[14] and heard at Manchester Piccadilly station in July 2011 and London's St Pancras International Station in September and October 2011. It won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, the judges calling it "groundbreaking".[15][16]

Greenlaw taught at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She served as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia from 2007 to 2013,[11] and as a visiting professor at King's College London (2015–2016) and Freie Universität Berlin (2017). She currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.[14][3]

After judging the 2010 Manchester Poetry Prize, Greenlaw chaired in 2014 the judging panel for the inaugural Folio Prize.[17][18] She is a Council member of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Chair of the Poetry Society.[11]

Greenlaw has lived in London for most of her life.[10][14][19]

Primarily a poet, Greenlaw has also written novels, short stories, plays and non-fiction. She has made radio documentaries. Her work for music includes the libretto for the opera Peter Pan composed by Richard Ayres (Staatsoper Stuttgart/Komische Oper Berlin/Welsh National Opera and Royal Opera House, 2015).[14][20][21] She has made contributions to the London Review of Books, The Guardian and The New Yorker.

Her work draws on her interest in science and scientific enquiry and covers themes of displacement, loss and belonging.[22][23] Critics have seen her poetry as remarkable for its precision; her best contain a complexity and elusiveness that lead them to "appreciate with each re-reading".[24]

Her biography notes, "She has written and adapted several dramas for radio, including Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, and a series on malaria called Five Fever Tales. She has made documentaries about Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop and several programmes about light, including trips to the Arctic midsummer and midwinter, the Baltic, the darkest place in England, light in London, and the solstices and equinoxes."[14]

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.[14] In 1994 she was also chosen as one of 20 New Generation Poets.[25] In 1997 she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for "A World Where News Travelled Slowly", the title poem from her second main collection.[26]

For her 2001 first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover, Greenlaw won the French Prix du Premier Roman.[27] She has been shortlisted for a number of literary awards, including the Whitbread Book Award (now 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.[28]

• The Cost of Getting Lost in Space (poetry), Turret Books, 1991, ISBN 978-0854690916
• 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, 1997, ISBN 978-0571326358
• 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, 2003, ISBN 978-0-571-22271-1
• Thoughts of a Night Sea (photographs by Garry Fabian Miller), Merrell, 2003, ISBN 978-1858942223
• An Irresponsible Age (novel), Fourth Estate, 2006, ISBN 978-0-00-715629-0
• The Importance of Music to Girls (non-fiction), Faber, 2007, ISBN 978-0-375-17454-4
• The Casual Perfect (poetry), 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.
• A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (poetry), Faber, 2014, ISBN 978-0-571-28454-2
• In the City of Love's Sleep (novel), Faber, 2018, ISBN 9780571337620
• The Built Moment (poetry), Faber, 2019, ISBN 978-0-571-347100

Greenlaw appeared as a "talking head" on the BBC documentaries Top of the Pops: The Story of 1976[29] (2011) and The Joy of the Single[30] (2012).

• 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.
• "Professor Lavinia Greenlaw", Royal Holloway, University of London