In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.