The Writer's Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love

(Hardback)

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Description

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 mythologized almost as much as the works themselves: Virginia Woolfs garden room at Monks House; the Bronts study at Haworth; Sigmund Freuds 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 and circumstances: in hotels, bedsits and boarding houses, at libraries and while on the move. From Prousts bedroom to Joan Didions portable typewriter, Maya Angelous hotel rooms to Ernest Hemingway in Parisian cafs and Michaela Coels Arabella with post-it notes in her rented room, Katie da Cunha Lewin dismantles the familiar furniture of the writers room and opens it up.
Blending cultural critique with the personal and historical, Katie da Cunha Lewin takes us on a fascinating journey through the hidden worlds that shape the books we love.

Reviews

'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 Writers 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 Lewins brilliant book The Writers Room is like a matryoshka: each room visited is also a visit to a life, to a work, to a geniuss 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

Author Bio

Katie da Cunha Lewin is a writer based in London, currently lecturing in 20th and 21st-century literature at Coventry University. She holds a PhD in contemporary literature and is the co-editor ofDon DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Her writing has appeared in theTimes Literary Supplement,The White Review, Irish Times,Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places.She loves exploring issues of writing and the writer in the 21st century.