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What makes a literary city?
Some emerge naturally but others need a nudge, with bookshops, festivals and more, to welcome readers and writers
One of the unexpected pleasures of travelling as an author is the sense of feeling immediately at home in an unknown city because it has libraries, bookshops, a culture of reading and creating spaces for readers.
I’ve felt this on first visits to great cities such as New York and London, but also in places such as Dublin or Kozhikode in Kerala, which last year became one of Unesco’s 53 Cities of Literature — and India’s first.
When I visited two years ago, Kozhikode was hosting an exuberant festival for writers across India on its magnificent beach, on the legendary Malabar Coast. It has nurtured Malayalam authors, from SK Pottekkatt to MT Vasudevan Nair and Indu Menon, and has a remarkable 550 libraries, over 70 publishers, and about 100 bookshops strung out across lanes fringed with coconut palms.
Most of all, though, Kozhikode felt welcoming because it so gladly made space for readers as part of the ebb and flow of city life.
Cities have to apply to be a Unesco City of Literature, a list that includes obvious choices such as Edinburgh, Iowa City and Beirut, but also more unexpected places, from to Taif in Saudi Arabia to Lviv in Ukraine, which has since transformed itself into a hub for refugees and those affected by the war. The Unesco committees rate applicants on factors such as quality and quantity of publishing, number of bookshops, literary festivals and events, and an active translation scene.
I’ve been to a few of these places and what links them, perhaps more than the strict norms of cultural bureaucracy, is an appetite for conversation around books, and an abiding sense that writers and readers are both made to feel at home.
Informal spaces such as these shape us, perhaps more than we realise. I grew up in Kolkata, where addas (a loose term for a gathering or hang-out) were part of the city’s life and gave us teenagers a respect for the life of the mind, art and creativity. As travel journalist Tania Banerjee wrote in a 2021 piece for the BBC: “Traditionally, a perfect adda should include a little bit of everything — politics, art, literature, science, debate, gossip, jokes, rumours, food, cigarettes and tea — and can take place anywhere: in a private home, a local tea shop, the park or a veranda.”
Often it’s writers who bring a location to life on the page. FT readers will have their own favourites, but I learnt the contours of Mumbai through Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, dreamt of Maine’s coasts thanks to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, set at the edge of the ocean, and cannot imagine Oxford, Mississippi, without William Faulkner’s voice in my ear.
But when it comes to what makes a place good for writers in practical terms, the list of what might turn a city into a properly literary one is more prosaic and urgent. Affordable rents, cafés and parks and spaces where you can walk or write undisturbed, so essential for flâneurs of all ages and genders, are obviously important: places where the air crackles with readings, if not full-blown addas. So too are libraries, bookshops and resource centres for writers.
In October Cities, his 2023 study of writers in three US cities, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York, the academic Carlo Rotella borrows a lovely phrase from the late Willa Cather — “cities of feeling”, which he describes as being “shaped by the flow of language, images and ideas; cities of fact by the flow of capital, materials and people. And each, of course, is shaped by the other.”
As Unesco’s initiative around creative cities — especially those of literature — underlines, that shaping can be deliberate. The Cities of Literature tag has enabled some places, such as Melbourne, to raise funds for large literary festivals, arrange writing grants and support independent bookshops, and also connect writers in one city with others in the network through residencies and exchange programmes.
But even without the label, there’s much any determined group of citizens could do to make their hometowns more like “cities of feeling”. How about investing in quiet co-working spaces for writers to develop their first books? Or making low-rent space available for independent bookshops in markets and malls? Or nurturing, as Kozhikode has, both small and large public libraries scattered?
Great literary cities can emerge spontaneously, from Paris to Portland, Oregon, but they can also be nudged into being.
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