Olivia Laing

 (born 14 April 1977) is a British writer and cultural critic. She won in 2018 the for non-fiction and in 2019 the  for her novel . In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the.

Quotes

 * ... What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don't find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us together, or trap us behind screens?


 * ... If you're a writer who works in biographies, you discover that that the people you're writing about aren't very nice. Not always. Sometimes they're wonderful.


 * … If some of England’s seemingly sublime gardens were economically dependent on the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of America and the West Indies, others were contingent upon the practice of, the legal process of taking the formerly open fields, commons and wasteland of the medieval period into private ownership.
 * (edited extract from The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing, published by on April 25, 2024)