Lavinia Greenlaw was an award-winning poet and novelist. Her most recent collection, Minsk, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for October 2003 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. This website is a tribute to a talented and celebrated poet.
Poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London in 1962. She read
Modern Arts at Kingston Polytechnic, studied Publishing at the London College of
Printing and has an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute. She has
worked as an editor at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London
and for the publishers Allison & Busby.
She was an arts
administrator at the South Bank Centre and for the London Arts Board before
becoming a freelance writer, reviewer and broadcaster in 1994. She has been
Writer in Residence at the Science Museum, Reader in Residence at the Royal
Festival Hall, London and was Poet in Residence at a firm of solicitors in
London. She is a regular reviewer and contributor to newspapers, magazines and
journals including the Times Literary Supplement and the New
Statesman, and her work has been broadcast by BBC radio and
television.
Lavinia Greenlaw was British Council Fellow in Writing at
Amherst College, Massachusetts in 1995 and was awarded an Arts Council Writers'
Award in 1995, a Wingate Scholarship in 1997 and a three-year fellowship by the
National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts in 2000. She was awarded
an Eric Gregory Award in 1990.
Her published poetry includes the
collections Night Photograph (1993), which was shortlisted for the
Whitbread Poetry Award and Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the
Year), and A World Where News Travelled Slowly (1997). The title poem
won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem). Her book, Thoughts of a
Night Sea (2003), is a collaboration with abstract photographer Garry
Fabian Miller, whose pictures prompted Greenlaw's meditations on his imaginary
world. Her third collection, Minsk, (2003), was shortlisted for the
2003 T. S. Eliot Prize.
Her first novel, Mary George of
Allnorthover (2001), set in England in the 1970s, was awarded the
2003 Prix du Premier Roman (France). Her latest book is An Irresponsible
Age (2006), a second novel set in London in the 1990s.
from Minsk, published by Faber in September 2003.
Read
SUSANNA RUSTIN
Financial Times review of Mary George of
Allnorthov
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