Writer's Room

What is it that so fascinates us about the spaces where writers work? 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 Brontë's study in the parsonage; Virginia Woolf's garden room at Monks House; 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, seemingly standing in for the labour of writing itself. And yet writers, old and new, have worked in all kinds of places: inhotels,bedsits and boarding houses, at libraries,in bathroomsand while on the move. From Emily Dickinson'shidden writing pocketto Lauren Elkin writing on her phoneon the bus,from Maya Angelou inhotel rooms and Ernest Hemingway in Parisian cafésto the founders of Women of Color Press around their kitchen tables,writer and academicKatie da Cunha Lewin dismantles the familiar furniture of the writer's room and opens it up. Blending cultural critique with the personal and historical,The Writer's Roomtakes us on a fascinating journey through the hidden worlds that shape the books we love.