In the world of arts and letters, there isn’t anyone quite like Lauren Redniss. Since her poignant pen-and-ink microhistories in the New York Times’ Op-Art section, Redniss has plowed a furrow between word and text, facts and fantasy, that, for lack of a better term, might be called visual nonfiction. Her first book, “Century Girl” (2006), related the life and times of Doris Eaton Travis, the last surviving member of the Ziegfeld Follies, with a zany bricolage of drawing, ephemera, and hand-lettered text. Four years later, Redniss released “Radioactive,” a stunning twin biography of Marie and Pierre Curie that intertwined the scientists’ love story with their collaborative discovery of radioactivity. (A film adaptation, directed by Marjane Satrapi and starring Rosamund Pike, came out in 2019.) Moving from the vanishingly small to the unthinkably vast, in “Thunder and Lightning” (2015), Redniss sang of fog, hail, and heat, as well as war, dominion, and profit; politics, always in the background in her biographies, moved to the fore, as she made visible the forces that shape and are shaped by the atmosphere. The following year, Redniss won the MacArthur “genius” grant, for work that “enriches the ways in which stories can be conveyed, experienced, and understood.”
