On the wall of a Ramsgate house owned by Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo hangs a large-scale cover of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. It might just as well read “A Cottage of One’s Own”, as that is precisely what the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) president is offering: writers will be able to stay in the property for free.
“I bought this cottage as my pension, and I decided that I could put it to use as a writer’s retreat,” Evaristo says. The choice was in part motivated by her own experience – “for many years I didn’t have my own home, I led a very peripatetic lifestyle, and I didn’t earn much money from my writing.”
Evaristo went to the RSL with the idea, and it soon became the seed of the new RSL Scriptorium awards, announced this week. Each year, 10 writers will have the opportunity to stay in the cottage for up to a month, with priority given to writers on low incomes and those who do not have a dedicated writing space.
Writers will have exclusive use of the house throughout their retreats, and won’t be allowed guests. The cottage, which has been set up to minimise distractions, is “very peaceful”, says Evaristo. Ramsgate itself is “a nice area, it’s near the sea, it’s quiet, it’s quite close to Margate and Broadstairs – there are lots of lovely walks along by the seafront, and there are great beaches.”
Built around 1900, the double-fronted cottage was once used as a school. “In the Kent area, there were lots of schools that would have, say, two or four students attending, so it must have been that kind of school,” says Evaristo. It has a bedroom, a study, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a couple of toilets and a bathroom.
The awards are named after the medieval English word “scriptorium”, meaning a room in which to write – particularly one in a monastery, where manuscripts were copied.
“It just felt like it was the right thing to do, to offer people somewhere to write,” Evaristo says, adding that, unlike in the US, there are limited free writing residencies on offer in the UK.
“We like to think we’re a more egalitarian society than we used to be, but the truth is, there are lots of people who have not come from moneyed backgrounds or privileged backgrounds, who have to find their way in the world without that kind of support,” says Evaristo. “It’s really important that we create these kinds of initiatives that enable people to do the work that they need to do.”
The awards are for “professionally active” writers but Evaristo highlighted research published by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society in 2022 showing that authors’ median earnings were just £7,000 a year, down from £12,330 in 2006.
Some of the most important writers “might not be commercially successful but they are absolutely culturally essential and instrumental in moving the arts and society forwards,” she adds. “Literature receives the least public funding out of all the art forms and most writers earn very little, which is no reflection on the quality of their writing.”
Interested writers will be able to apply in spring next year via the RSL website, where they will be asked for details of previously published or produced works and other relevant information. Evaristo herself will not be on the application review panel.
Evaristo, who lives in London, is the author of 10 books including Girl, Woman, Other, which won the 2019 Booker prize. In 2022, she became the president of the RSL.