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Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London, where she has lived for most of her life. Her teenage years were spent in an Essex village. She has published six collections of poetry with Faber & Faber including Minsk (2003), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot, Forward and Whitbread Poetry Prizes, and The Casual Perfect (2011). A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (2014) was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. Her latest collection, The Built Momentwas published in February 2019.

Her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover, was published in 2001 and won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. A second novel, An Irresponsible Age, appeared in 2006, and her third, In the City of Love’s Sleep, in 2018. She has also written three works of experimental non-fiction: The Importance of Music to Girls (2007), Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland (2011) and Some Answers Without Questions (2021).

She has published and broadcast short stories, including We Are Watching Something Terrible Happening and The Darkest Place in England, both of which were shortlisted for the National Short Story Award.

Her sound work, Audio Obscura, was commissioned in 2011 from Artangel and Manchester International Festival, and won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. It is now available to experience on Soundcloud.  In 2016, she wrote and directed her first film, The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, which premiered at the Estuary Festival and has been shown at the Southbank Centre in London and as part of Hull’s City of Culture programme among other places.

In 2013, she was one of the first two artists to receive a two-year Wellcome Engagement Fellowship. She has an MA in seventeenth-century art from the Courtauld Institute and was awarded a three-year NESTA fellowship in 2001 in order to pursue her interest in vision, landscape and perception. Other awards she has received include an Eric Gregory Award (1990), an Arts Council Writers’ Award (1995), Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 1997 (for ‘A World Where News Travelled Slowly’), a Cholmondeley Award and a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship.

She was the first artist-in-residence at the Science Museum and has also held residencies at the Royal Festival Hall and the Royal Society of Medicine. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004 and has served as a member of the RSL Council. She is a former Chair of the Poetry Society and was chair of judges for the inaugural Folio Prize. From 2013 to 2018, she was an artistic advisor to 14-18 Now.

She taught at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and was Professor of Poetry at UEA (2007-2013), and a visiting professor at King’s College London (2015-16) and the Freie Universität Berlin (2017). In September 2017, she was made Chair of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

She also writes about music, perception and art. Commissions she has undertaken include pieces on Elizabeth Price for Frieze, on a total solar eclipse for The New Yorker, Titian for the National Gallery, Eva Hesse for The Guardian, Constable for Tate Britain, Christine Borland for Bookworks, and Garry Fabian Miller for the V&A, as well as a poem to mark the centenary of the Theory of Relativity for the Science Museum.

Her work for music includes the libretto for Peter Pan (Staatsoper Stuttgart/Komische Oper Berlin/Welsh National Opera and Royal Opera House 2015-16), composer: Richard Ayres. She has also written song texts including the cycle Slow passage, low prospect (composer: Richard Baker, 2004 Aldeburgh Festival).

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 investigations into Arctic midsummer and midwinter, the Baltic, the darkest place in England, light in London, and the solstices and equinoxes.