A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary by Alain de Botton
Earlier this year, Alain de Botton, writer of a number of best-selling essayistic books on love, travel, architecture and literature wrote about the inner workings of Britain’s busiest airport with its staff and passengers becoming the book’s contents.
Parts of the book – titled A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary – were written from a desk at Heathrow Terminal 5 allowing passengers travelling through the airport last August to potentially appear as a character within the story.
The author was given unprecedented access to all areas of the airport and full creative control over the finished book, which has been commissioned by Heathrow.
Alain commented: “I have always found airports mesmerising. If you wanted to take a Martian to a single place that best captures everything that is distinctive and particular to modern civilisation, in its highs and lows, you would undoubtedly take them to the airport. This is where you can see in action all the big themes that we otherwise know just as abstractions: the power of technology, globalisation, the environmental debate, consumerism, the frenzy of the modern workplace and the dreams of travel.
One of the great problems of contemporary literature is that writers do not get out and about much. That is why most books, especially novels, circle endlessly around private emotional life. Partly this is because many of the most interesting locations of the modern world are closed off to visitors and hard to access. It therefore felt like an exceptional opportunity for me when Heathrow announced its intention to appoint a writer-in-residence. It seemed at once imaginative, generous and plain fun. It has to be hoped that more companies will follow Heathrow’s lead and that we will soon have a new kind of literature based on writers engaging with what makes the modern world function.”
The book is now available at Amazon.co.uk – click on the graphic below more more details.
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