The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love
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. From Emily Dickinson’s hidden writing pocket to Lauren Elkin typing on her phone on the bus, Maya Angelou in hotel rooms and Ernest Hemingway in Parisian cafés to the founders of Women of Color Press around their kitchen tables, Katie da Cunha Lewin dismantles the familiar furniture of the writer’s room and opens it up.
The Writer’s Room takes us on a fascinating journey through the hidden worlds that shape the books we love. It is the perfect gift for the reader in your life.
__
‘If you have ever felt preoccupied with visiting, snooping and uncovering the desks, shelves and habits of the greats, this book was made for you.’ Penny Wincer, author of Home Matters
‘A reverie – part pilgrimage, part personal reflection – on the places where writers find the right words.’ Clare Hunter, author of Threads of Life
-
‘A reverie – part pilgrimage, part personal reflection – on the places where writers find the right words. Katie da Cunha Lewin takes us on an intriguing journey through time and technology to reveal the public and private worlds of writers, past and present.’
- Clare Hunter, author of Threads of Life -
‘Hand in hand with the question ‘what do writers do all day?’ is ‘…and where do they do it?’. Katie da Cunha Lewin’s book is an intimate delight and radical demystifier, making the conditions, rituals, and set-ups required for writing to happen individual, multiple, and political.’
- Jen Calleja, author of Fair: The Life-Art of Translation -
‘The Writer’s Room taps into our deep obsession with the spaces associated with creating great works of literature, in the most delightful way. If you have ever felt preoccupied with visiting, snooping and uncovering the desks, shelves and habits of the greats, as well and creating your own, this book was made for you.’
- Penny Wincer, author of Home Matters -
‘Katie Da Cunha Lewin’s brilliant book The Writer’s Room is like a matryoshka: each room visited is also a visit to a life, to a work, to a genius’s subjectivity and its many obsessions. Da Cunha Lewin successfully attempts to unravel that exact mix of solitude and companionship, protection and exposure, silence and conversation that writing requires. A book of rare skill and complexity for all those who love literature and wonder about it.’
- Guadalupe Nettel, author of Still Born