Writer’s Room by Katie da Cunha Lewin

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 Woolf’s garden room at Monks House; the Bronte’s study at Haworth; 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 and circumstances: in hotels, bedsits and boarding houses, at libraries and while on the move. From Proust’s bedroom to Joan Didion’s portable typewriter, Maya Angelou’s hotel rooms to Ernest Hemingway in Parisian cafes and Michaela Coel’s Arabella with post-it notes in her rented room, Katie da Cunha Lewin dismantles the familiar furniture of the writer’s 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.

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

Discover the hidden worlds that shape the books we love.

About the Author: 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 of Don DeLillo: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Her writing has appeared in the Times 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.

11 Sep 2025
 

The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love by Katie da Cunha Lewin ISBN 9781783969098