Afl. 190: In converstation with Canadian writer Christine Lai

Christine Lai is a writer. Her work moves between literature, visual art, and spatial thinking, exploring how people relate to memory, place, loss, and ecological change. She is interested in the role of art and storytelling as ways of preserving, understanding, and reimagining the world around us. Her debut novel Landscapes is set in a near future marked by ecological collapse. In an English countryside devastated by heat and drought, Penelope archives the remains of a once-renowned art collection in a decaying country house that is soon to be demolished. While cataloguing the estate’s library, she keeps a diary of her final months there, confronting questions of memory, preservation, violence, and the fragile relationship between humans and their environments. Blending fiction, essay, and diary, Landscapes explores the meaning of art, beauty, and remembrance in a time of crisis. Lai’s novel has been praised for its crystalline prose, atmospheric world-building, and its thoughtful engagement with ecology, feminism, architecture, and art history. Her work has been compared to writers such as Rachel Cusk, Kazuo Ishiguro, and A. S. Byatt. With a quiet yet urgent voice, Christine Lai examines what it means to care for what is disappearing — landscapes, artworks, memories, and human connections — and how art can become an act of preservation, resistance, and renewal.