In this pre-recorded conversation, Lavinia Greenlaw FRSL and Emily Ogden discuss their recent books, covering love, creativity, speechlessness, knowingness, and the existential questions of everyday life. 

Part memoir, part manifesto, Lavinia Greenlaw’s Some Answers Without Questions is a rigorous and lyrical work of self-investigation. Greenlaw asks what enables anyone – but a woman and an artist in particular – to create and respond even when not invited to do so. Some Answers Without Questions is the result of decades of answering questions that don’t really matter – and not being asked the ones that do. 

And speaking of questions, Emily Ogden’s On Not Knowing explores the questions she can’t set aside: not knowing how to give birth, to listen, to hold it together. In these essays, Ogden looks at the general condition of uncertainty within which we live our lives.  

This is will be a pre-recorded discussion. If you have a question for either Polly or Fiona, please email it to [email protected] by Monday 19 September for the chance to have it answered during the recording. 

Presented in partnership with Lit Hub.

Lavinia Greenlaw has published three novels and six collections of poetry. Her books of nonfiction are Some Answers Without Questions and The Importance of Music to Girls, Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland. Her writing has appeared in frieze, the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, among other publications. 

Emily Ogden is associate professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism, (University of Chicago Press). She lives in Charlottesville, VA. On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays is published by University of Chicago Press in the U.S. and Peninsula Press in the U.K.