Writers' Rooms RSS

In the latest of their series taking a peek into the creative spaces of Wales’s leading authors, award-winning writer Tristan Hughes shows Wales Arts Review his cabin in the woods... 'When I was younger, I used to imagine writers’ rooms. They were romantic places; often housed somewhere in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, high up in garrets, along streets in bohemian quarters, around the corner from smoky cafes. I pictured them as repositories of long and marvellous accumulation – filled with great heaps of paper, piles of leather-bound books, a whiff of opium in the air, wine stains on...

'I am fortunate in having two rooms to write in: one is the loft of our Grangetown home, from which I can hear the wheeze of approaching trains and oversee movement on the platform at Cardiff Central station; the other, far less cluttered, is pictured here. It is the basement of a house in Rabós, a small village in the Alt Empordà region of Catalunya. I am split between two countries, and two homes. It is a privilege, of course, but I run the risk of feeling as though I am permanently coming up against my own absence. I am...

For the latest in Wales Arts Review's Writers’ Rooms series, poet, essayist and academic Zoë Brigley invites us into her workspace in her home in Ohio. 'It is so important for mothers to have a “room of one’s own.” But it’s unrealistic to think that this space will ever be entirely free of children, nor would I want it to be. I often find people asking me about the “pram in the hall” problem for writers who are mothers, but I don’t feel worse for having my children be part of my writing life. In fact, they have made me sharper,...