Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London, where she has lived for most of her life. She has published three collections of poetry:
Night Photograph (1993), A World Where News Travelled Slowly (1997) and Minsk (2003), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot, Forward and Whitbread Poetry Prizes. Her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover, was published in 2001 and has appeared in the Netherlands, the United States, Germany and France, where it won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. A second novel, An Irresponsible Age, appeared in 2006 and her memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls, was published in 2007.

She has collaborated with the photographic artist Garry Fabian Miller on Thoughts of a Night Sea (2003), and has edited Signs and Humours: the poetry of medicine (2007) and, with Helon Habila, New Writing 13.

She wrote the libretto for Ian Wilson’s chamber operas Hamelin and Minsk. Her other work for music includes Slow passage, low prospect, a song cycle for the composer Richard Baker, commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival, and Written on a train, commissioned from Richard Baker by the Buitoni-Borletti Trust for the singer Christianne Stotijn.

She taught for five years on the Creative Writing MA programme at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is now Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Her awards include an Arts Council of England Writer’s Award, Switzerland’s Spycher-Leuk Literaturpreis and a three-year fellowship from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). She was the British Council Fellow in Writing at Amherst College in 1995, and has held residencies with, among others, the Science Museum, the Royal Festival Hall and the Royal Society of Medicine. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and formerly Chair of the Poetry Society.

Commissions she has undertaken include writing about the misericords of Beverley Minster, the Swiss Re tower, Constable for Tate Britain, Christine Borland for Bookworks, Garry Fabian Miller for the V&A as well as a sequence about numbers for Channel 4 and a poem to mark the centenary of the Theory of Relativity for the Science Museum.

She has written drama and adaptations for BBC radio, and has made documentaries on the Arctic, the Baltic, the idea of mountains, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, the darkest place in England, and the solstices and equinoxes. She has also written essays on poetry and science, Bob Dylan and delay, and seventeenth-century wonder.