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Tommy Orange wrote There There mainly while living in Oakland, California, the city where the novel is set and which deeply informs its stories and characters. He began working on the book around 2013 and continued over several years, with its publication in 2018. Orange has mentioned that writing from his lived experience and community helped ground the multiple voices and narratives in the novel.

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Nervous Conditions (written early to mid-1980s)

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The novel was published in 1988, and Dangarembga has spoken about how the post-independence social and political climate of Zimbabwe deeply influenced her writing. At that time, she was living in Harare (then Salisbury), where she witnessed firsthand the tensions around gender, education, and colonial legacy that shape the novel’s themes.

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The Emperor of Gladness (written 2018-2024)

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Ocean Vuong’s surroundings in New York City have influenced The Emperor of Gladness in subtle but meaningful ways.

Living in a bustling, diverse metropolis while writing a novel set in a small, decaying Connecticut town created a contrast that sharpened his focus on themes of isolation, community, and belonging. The city’s energy and Vuong’s role as a professor immersed him in layers of storytelling, language, and identity, which seep into the novel’s intricate character relationships and emotional depth. At the same time, the quiet, intimate moments of caregiving and unexpected friendship in the book offer a counterpoint to the noise of urban life, suggesting Vuong’s awareness of how place shapes human connection—whether in a sprawling city or a fading small town.

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Karl Ove Knausgård wrote My Struggle: Book One in his Stockholm apartment over roughly eight months between early 2008 and 2009, breaking a long spell of writer’s block. Immersed in the rhythms of domestic life—caring for his children, making breakfast, walking to the nursery—he worked in the gaps between family routines, channeling those ordinary moments directly into the book’s raw, unfiltered narrative.

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Han Kang wrote The White Book while living in Warsaw, Poland, during a writer’s residency. She has said the city’s stark winter light, its history of destruction and rebuilding, and her solitary walks through its streets deeply influenced the book’s meditative tone and imagery.

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The Forty Rules of Love (written 2008-2009)

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Elif Shafak employed a unique bilingual writing method. She initially wrote the novel in English, then had it translated into Turkish. Upon reviewing that translation, she rewrote the Turkish version to imbue it with her voice and rhythm. Finally, she returned to the English text and rewrote it again with fresh insight, effectively crafting two parallel versions in English and Turkish at the same time.

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The Blue Fox (written early 2000s- 2003)

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While Sjón hasn’t publicly shared a specific location or city where he wrote The Blue Fox, we do know where he generally works. He resides in central Reykjavík, Iceland, and is known to do most of his writing in a distinctive setting—an old fisherman’s cottage in the city. He has described it as writing “in the belly of the whale”—immersed, atmospheric, and profoundly inspired by Iceland’s rugged surroundings.

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David Mitchell was living in Hiroshima, Japan when he began Cloud Atlas.

He had moved there in the early 1990s to teach English and ended up staying for about eight years. During that time, he started work on the novel, drawing from his experiences and observations of Japanese life—especially the futuristic corporate and urban elements that appear in the “Sonmi~451” section.

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The Handmaid’s Tale was written by Margaret Atwood in West Berlin and Alabama in 1984. Atwood has said she began the novel while living in West Berlin, surrounded by the atmosphere of Cold War surveillance and division, and later continued writing during a teaching residency at the University of Alabama.