Allen & Unwin The Importance of Music to Girls book Biography English Paperback 208 pages

The Importance of Music to Girls is award-winning poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw's vivid and engaging portrait of what music means to us as we grow up.

If I had not kissed anyone, or danced with anyone, or had a reason to cry, the music made me feel as if I had gone through all that anyway...the music attracted and repelled, organised and disturbed and then let us into the night, clusters of emotion ready to dissolve into sleep. In The Importance of Music to Girls, Lavinia Greenlaw tells the story of the adventures that music leads us into: getting drunk, falling in love, dying of boredom, cutting our hair, terrifying our parents, wanting to change the world.This is a vivid memoir unlike any other, recalling the furious passion of being young, female, and coming alive through music.

Lavinia Greenlaw was born in 1962. Night Photograph (1993) was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for First Collection and the Whitbread Poetry Prize; A World Where News Travelled Slowly (1997) was her award-winning second collection and most recently she published Minsk (2003) which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her novel, Mary George of Allnorthover (Flamingo), was published in 2001. She lives in London and works as a freelance writer, critic and broadcaster.