Venture with Olivia Laing into the lonely city, exploring urban loneliness by way of the work and lives of some of America’s greatest artists, among them Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz and Henry Darger.

Olivia Laing’s forthcoming third book is a cultural history of urban loneliness, and she’ll be discussing the research process and some of the major themes from Warhol’s fear of speech to the devastating stigma of the AIDS epidemic. Olivia Laing is 2014 Eccles British Library Writer in Residence and author of To the River and The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (Canongate). She’s a regular contributor to the Guardian, New Statesman and the New York Times and is the former deputy literary editor of the Observer.

Sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library