“It meant I can carry on doing strange things,” Olivia Laing tells me from their home in Suffolk. “I’ll probably be allowed to carry on writing these quite weird books for a while longer.” They are talking about winning a Windham-Campbell Prize a few years ago, worth $175,000: a lifeline to any writer.

“Strange things” is one way of putting it. Laing is best known for genre-defying books that blend memoir, essay, history and biography. Among the best known are The Lonely City (2016), about artists whose work is permeated with loneliness, and The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), about writers with a fondness for the bottle.

Yet Laing is a creature of habit, perhaps embodying Gustave Flaubert’s direction that a writer should “be settled and orderly in your life, in order that you may be wild and original in your work.” (At the start of our conversation, they realise they haven’t had their regular 10.30am cup of coffee. “Oh my God! I knew there was something wrong with today.”)

Laing is nonbinary. They say, “I’ve always been a nonbinary person. I’ve been public about it for years, since first talking about it in The Lonely City. There’s been a lot of helpful increase in visibility and language. But the reason I decided to switch pronouns was after the supreme court verdict in Scotland this year [where the court ruled that, for the purposes of the UK Equality Act, the word “woman” referred