Lavinia Greenlaw & Sean O'Hagan. Friday 27 March, 7.00pm

Queen’s University, Lecture Theatre G9

Part of Between The Lines 2009

Lavinia Greenlaw

Born in London, where she has mainly lived, Lavinia Greenlaw’s poetry collections include Night Photograph (1993), A World Where News Travelled Slowly (1997) and Minsk (2003). Her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover (2001), won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger; her second novel, An Irresponsible Age (2006), was followed by a memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls (2007). Having completed Thoughts of a Night Sea (2003), a collaboration with a photographer, and edited Signs and Humours: the poetry of medicine (2007), she wrote the libretto for Ian Wilson’s chamber operas Hamelin and Minsk, the song cycle Slow passage, low prospect for the Aldeburgh Festival, and Written on a train, commissioned by the Buitoni-Borletti Trust. She taught for five years on the Creative Writing MA programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is now Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Commissions include a sequence about numbers for Channel 4 as well as drama and adaptations for BBC radio and numerous documentaries on subjects ranging from the Arctic to Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop. She has also written essays on poetry and science, Bob Dylan and delay, and seventeenth-century wonder.

Sean O’Hagan

Sean O’Hagan grew up in Armagh. He moved to London in the mid-seventies and obtained a Degree in English at the Polytechnic of North London (1982). He wrote for the NME (1984-89), then for various magazines including the Face and Arena.During the 1990s, he wrote extensively on art and culture for The Times and The Guardian. Since 2001, he has been a feature writer and interviewer for The Observer. His subjects have included Damien Hirst, Joan Didion, John Berger, Paul Auster, John McGahern, Anselm Kiefer, Tom Waits, Richard Serra, Gilbert & George, Robert Frank and Neil Young. In 2003, he was named Interviewer of the Year in the British Press Awards for his profiles of Roy Keane, George Best and Brian Wilson.

He currently lives in Hastings and is writing a memoir for Bloomsbury. The book, as yet untitled, uses songs as map reference points on a journey back into three different time frames, places and states of mind.

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