where i write

Virginia Woolf said that 'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'. She worked in this room:

You can visit it as part of the museum at her old country home, Monk's House. In fact, there seems to be a bit of a fascination with the places where authors work. If you want to, you can also go and see Charles Dickens', Jane Austen's or Leo Tolstoy's desk, which have all been carefully preserved (the last one with a glass box over it to protect his papers and notebooks exactly as they were, or might have been, when he was living).

We're curious about modern writers' workspaces too. A few years ago, the Guardian ran a series of 'portraits of the spaces where writers create' called Writers' Rooms. Each week, a photo of a different room was featured, with the writer's thoughts about what the space meant to them. Writers are an inventive group of people, and their rooms are no exception -- it's interesting to see how much importance they place on the furniture, the pictures on the walls, the view out of the window (lots of them seem to work in attics). For some of them, you sense that the room itself has been constructed with the kind of attention to detail they put into their work, almost superstitiously, in the hopes that it will be an ideal home for creativity.

I'm sometimes asked for a photo or a description of where I work. Mostly, I write wherever I can find the time and space; I've never had a writing room, and that suits me fine. But six months ago, I moved to a new flat in Durham, which had this store room:

And here's how it looks now:

A writing space. It's very simple compared to most of the writers' rooms featured in the Guardian, but this room has everything I need, and most of the things you can see in Virginia Woolf's room too: a desk, a window for some natural light, a lamp for when it gets darker. I think she would approve...