A couple of weeks ago, New York Times’ T Magazine published a short series of portraits about five writers and their workspaces. With only a snapshot of the author within his or her writing environment, and a short text about why the place is arranged exactly like that, the portraits are much more personal that the usual show-me-your-nicely-designed-flat and manages to actually tell a story around the work that the authors do, rather than their relation to furniture and status symbols.
My personal favorite is Joyce Carol Oates and her desk in front of the window, with a view directly out to nature. She describes it the following:
This writing room replicates, to a degree, the old, lost vistas of my childhood. What it contains is less significant to me than what it overlooks, though obviously there are precious things here — photographs of my parents and my grandmother. Photographs of my husband Raymond Smith, who died in 2008, and of my second husband, Charlie Gross. Portraits of me by my friend Gloria Vanderbilt. Like all writers, I have made my writing room a sanctuary of the soul.