In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005 finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011 a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009 named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007 reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim feat of literary innovation and grace, never before published in the UK. Much like Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of ‘pillow book’ about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend.

Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laingīluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson