Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing began To the River, her first book, in the wake of a breakup, and followed it with The Trip to Echo Spring, an investigation into writers’ drinking habits. “Writing about water and drowning,” she said in a 2017 interview, “led me to think about drowning one’s sorrow and the liquid lives of alcoholic writers.” She most recently published The Lonely City, an investigation into the relationship between isolation and creativity. In 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize.