Brian Dillon, Olivia Laing

Two acclaimed non-fiction writers (and art critics) Olivia Laing and Brian Dillon discuss their latest books, both of which resonate with the Biennale’s title The Faraway Nearby.

Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Canongate) finds an unexpected connection between loneliness and art, drawing on a difficult episode living in New York; while Kent-based Dillon’s The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War, and a Disaster on the Kent Marshes (Penguin Books) is a highly personal study of a traumatic, but now mostly forgotten event, that took place in the remote and enigmatic marshlands near Faversham.