The Writer's Room

Speaker: Katie da Cunha Lewin

What is it that so fascinates us about the places where writers live and create?

Why does a remote cabin, ramshackle shed or library garret, strewn with papers and piled with books, so capture our imagination?

The rooms of certain writers are mythologised almost as much as the works themselves: the Brontës’ study in the parsonage; Virginia Woolf’s garden room; Sigmund Freud’s study, with its famous couch. They are preserved in writers’ houses or recreated in museums, pictured and described in newspaper columns and on Instagram.

And yet writers, old and new, have worked in all kinds of places: in bedsits and boarding houses, at libraries, in bathrooms and while on the move. Katie da Cunha Lewin, author of The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love, dismantles the familiar furniture of the writer’s room and opens it up.

Join her for a discussion ranging from Emily Dickinson’s hidden writing pocket to Lauren Elkin typing on her phone on the bus, and from Maya Angelou in hotel rooms and Ernest Hemingway in Parisian cafés, to the founders of Women of Color Press around their kitchen tables.

Book sales

You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.

Portrait image credit: Sophie Davidson

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