Some Answers Without Questions

The place I went to when I could not speak was also where my voice came from. Part memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is a rigorous and lyrical work of self-investigation. Lavinia Greenlaw sets out to explore the impulse to say something, to write or sing, and finds herself confronting matters of presence and absence, anger and speechlessness, authority and permission. The result is important and timely, a spirited and vital exploration of 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.

Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London where she has lived for most of her life. She studied seventeenth-century art at the Courtauld Institute, and was awarded a NESTA fellowship to pursue her interest in vision, travel and perception. Her poetry includes Minsk, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot, Forward and Whitbread Poetry Prizes. She has also published novels and works of non-fiction which include The Importance of Music to Girls,Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland and Some Answers Without Questions (2021). She has won a number of prizes and held residencies at the Science Museum and the Royal Society of Medicine. Her work for BBC radio includes programmes about the Arctic, the Baltic, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop.