Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing
(image source: ny times)
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British writer and critic with a particular interest in art, sexuality and cities; author of To the River (the story of the Ouse, the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941; one midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked it from source to sea), The Trip to Echo Spring (why is it that some of the greatest works of literature have been produced by writers in the grip of alcoholism? the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver) and The Lonely City (moving fluidly between works and lives – from Hopper's Nighthawks to Warhol's Time Capsules, from Henry Darger's hoarding to David Wojnarowicz's AIDS activism – an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone)

• La ciudad solitaria

(A Life in Books)