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 record 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.

Portrait

Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London. She studied seventeenth-century art at the Courtauld Institute, and was the first artist in residence at the Science Museum. Her awards include a Nesta Fellowship, the Ted Hughes Award for her immersive soundwork, Audio Obscura, and a Wellcome Engagement Fellowship. She has published six collections of poetry with Faber, including Minsk (2003), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot, Forward and Whitbread Poetry prizes, A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (2014) which was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, and The Built Moment (2019). Her novels include In the City of Love's Sleep (2018), and her non-fiction includes The Importance of Music to Girls (2007), Some Answers Without Questions (2021) and The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further (2024). Her Selected Poems was published in 2024. She is Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.