Funny Weather

In this inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century.'Never has a publication been more timely' - Dazed'A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art’ - TelegraphFunny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their roles in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time.We’re often told art can’t change anything. In Funny Weather, Laing argues that it can. It changes how we see the world, it exposes inequality, and it offers fertile new ways of living.

A brave writer whose books open up fundamental questions about life and art, Olivia Laing is my new favourite non-fiction writer, Like all great critics, Olivia Laing combines formidable intelligence with boundless curiosity and fabulous taste, but she also has a rare quality of intimacy; an ability to connect the reader to a work of art or literature with a directness that lights it up like nothing else. It’s why I read her, Her observations and poetic incisiveness on art, writers and politics are a gift. This is a fascinating, excursive, tonic of a book, A thought-provoking, inspiring collection that you can go back to whenever the weather takes a funny turn

Olivia Laing is the author of three acclaimed works of non-fiction, To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City, which has been translated into seventeen languages and sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.Laing writes on art and culture for many publications, including the Guardian, New York Times and frieze. Her collected writing on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, was published in 2020. She lives in Suffolk.