Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw is a writer who lives in London. She studied seventeenth-century art and her interest in perception, optical technologies, landscape and questions of travel led to her being the first artist in residence at the Science Museum. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (Faber 2014). Her other works include two novels and the memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls (Faber 2007). Audio Obscura, her immersive soundwork for Artangel/Manchester International Festival won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award. Her first short film, The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, a study of the impact of dementia on our sense of time and place, drawing on Shakespeare's The Tempest, will premiere at the Estuary Festival in September 2016. She also writes about music, perception and art. Her commissions have included pieces on Joy Division for the London Review of Books, a total solar eclipse for The New Yorker, and a poem to mark the centenary of the Theory of Relativity for the Science Museum. Her work for radio includes documentaries about vision and light with subjects ranging from Arctic midsummer and midwinter to a year-long study of the solstices and equinoxes in Britain. She has also written and directed several radio dramas. Formerly Professor of Poetry at the University of East Anglia, she has been a Visiting Professor at King's College London and will be the Samuel Fischer Guest Professor at the Freie Universitat Berlin in Spring 2017.