1. Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw was born on 30 July 1962 and is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer.
20 Facts About Lavinia Greenlaw
1. 2.
Lavinia Greenlaw won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T S Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize.
3.
Lavinia Greenlaw was shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Poetry Award for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde.
4.
Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London into a medical and scientific family, and has a sister and two brothers.
5.
Lavinia Greenlaw went on to read modern arts at Kingston Polytechnic.
6.
Lavinia Greenlaw then studied at the London College of Printing and gained an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute.
7.
Lavinia Greenlaw worked as an arts administrator for Southbank Centre and the London Arts Board.
8.
Lavinia Greenlaw became the first artist-in-residence at the Science Museum, and has since held residences at the Royal Festival Hall, at a London solicitors' firm, and at the Royal Society of Medicine.
9.
Lavinia Greenlaw served as professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia from 2007 to 2013, and as a visiting professor at King's College London and Freie Universitat Berlin.
10.
Lavinia Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
11.
Lavinia Greenlaw is a Council member of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Chair of The Poetry Society.
12.
In October 2023, Lavinia Greenlaw was announced as Poetry Editor of Faber and Faber, in succession to Matthew Hollis.
13.
Primarily a poet, Lavinia Greenlaw was the author of two pamphlets, The Cost of Getting Lost in Space and Love from a Foreign City, before her first full-length collection, Night Photograph, was published in 1993 by Faber.
14.
Lavinia Greenlaw's work was included in the 1997 Bloodaxe Books anthology Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets, edited by Maura Dooley, and the same year Greenlaw's second collection, A World Where News Travelled Slowly, was published.
15.
Lavinia Greenlaw went on to write novels, short stories, plays and non-fiction.
16.
Lavinia Greenlaw has made documentaries about Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop and several programmes about light, including trips to the Arctic midsummer and midwinter, the Baltic, the darkest place in England, light in London, and the solstices and equinoxes.
17.
Lavinia Greenlaw received an Eric Gregory Award in 1990, an Arts Council Writers' Award in 1995, a Cholmondeley Award, and a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship.
18.
In 1997, Lavinia Greenlaw won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for "A World Where News Travelled Slowly", the title poem from her second main collection.
19.
Lavinia Greenlaw has been shortlisted for a number of literary awards, including the Whitbread Book Award and the T S Eliot Prize for Poetry.
20.
Lavinia Greenlaw appeared as a "talking head" on the BBC documentaries Top of the Pops: The Story of 1976 and The Joy of the Single.