The homes of famous writers have a strange allure. A suggestion of genius in the air, perhaps. In the Telegraph, Claudia FitzHerbert has a beguiling piece on newly-reopened Max Gate (pictured), the house in which Thomas Hardy wrote many
of his most celebrated works.
Having the name of a famous writer in the town hall records is a boon for any local authority. Take a bow Stratford-upon-Avon. The recently refurbished RSC theatre is just the start. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust looks after a variety of Bard-related real estate including the Henley Street house in which Shakespeare was born, Anne Hathaway’s
cottage and the farm once occupied by Shakespeare’s mother.
My own nod for best writer’s house has to go to Wordsworth’s country retreat, Dove Cottage. The cramped, fidgety
little rooms and dusky lighting make the poet’s paeans to the outdoors seem perfectly logical. Plus, my visit last year happened to coincide with that of a certain Seamus Heaney, a man many might
consider Wordsworth’s present-day heir. Two for the price of one, if ever.
Award for quirkiest writerly abode, meanwhile, is won by Charles Darwin. For Darwin at 200 in 2009, Christ’s College, Cambridge made a motherly fuss over Darwin’s old college rooms, redecorating the insides to best echo the original right down to chalking in Darwin’s name outside the staircase (pictures included on the link above), an act of architectural homage afforded few. And back on more tradition terrain, of course, there are the canonical pilgrimages to Jane Austen’s house or Keats’s Hampstead pad. But Britain groans with many more. Any good recommendations?
Battle of the shortlists
In other news, the shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize I championed a few weeks ago has been announced. Much noise has been made about the Orange Prize shortlist also announced last week, overshadowing it’s shyer sibling in the publicity stakes. But the kooky slant of the IFF prize is in the detail, with the translator’s netting a well-deserved co-credit here and a fifty-fifty split of the winnings. Orange announces its winner on 8 June while the IFF victor will be crowned on May 26.
Notes on a scandal
World Book Night is still attracting posthumous controversy. A complaint from the writer Stephen Hunt, co-signed by 85 others writers, has lambasted the BBC for its ‘sneering’ and ‘derogatory’ attitude to ‘commercial
fiction’ on the night, with the show The Books We Really Read targeted as the prime offender. The choice of adjectives is perhaps a tad unfair, but (as I argued here) the inclusion of a John Sutherland-type enthusiast might have becalmed some of the signatories (though, in fairness,
the show also contained the fabulously crotchety pop-lit manifesto of Lee Child). But the 85 authors have a valid point about the night as a whole. With James Patterson topping the charts last
week, and as this year’s library figures show, it is definitely Patterson rather than Proust
that readers are eager to get their hands on.
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