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The Writer's Room

The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love

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Pub Date Sep 11 2025 | Archive Date Not set

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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 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: in hotels, bedsits and boarding houses, at libraries, in bathrooms and while on the move. From Emily Dickinson’s hidden writing pocket to Lauren Elkin writing on her phone on the bus, from Maya Angelou in hotel rooms and Ernest Hemingway in Parisian cafés to the founders of Women of Color Press around their kitchen tables, writer and academic 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, The Writer's Room 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 spaces where writers work?

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


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781783969098
PRICE £16.99 (GBP)
PAGES 288

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Featured Reviews

The Writer's Room is about so much more than the spaces where writers work.

Katie da Cunha Lewin takes us on a thoughtful and reflective journey into the past of familiar writers such as Virginia Woolf and Maya Angelou, while beautifully weaving in her own journey with writing.

Her exploration of financial stability and on gender and racial divides as factors in the writing process was done with such care and self-awareness. Katie da Cunha Lewin takes what could have easily been a niche deep dive that excluded many people into one that is a unpretentious and quiet celebration of artists and creativity in its essence.

A beautiful read from start to finish — Katie da Cunha Lewin's prose is introspective and invites the reader to sit at the table and participate too.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Elliott & Thompson for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

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