The author Alain de Botton has been named Heathrow airport's writer in residence, and will spend a week writing at a desk in the middle of a terminal there.by: Andrew Adam Newman
TRAVELERS passing through Heathrow Airport in London this week may be surprised to encounter, in the middle of bustling Terminal 5, the writer Alain de Botton, author of popular books including “How Proust Can Change Your Life” and “The Art of Travel,” seated at a desk and tapping away at his laptop computer. His typing appears in real time on a screen behind him, and a placard explains — in what apparently is both a literary and aeronautic first — that Mr. de Botton is serving a one-week appointment as Heathrow’s “writer in residence.”
Mr. de Botton, who is bunking at the adjacent Sofitel London Heathrow, will stray from his desk to interview passengers, baggage handlers, airline executives and more. Afterward, he will return home to turn his airport reporting into a short book, “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary,” to be published by the British publisher Profile Books in September.
On Sept. 21, the book, which will include photographs by Richard Baker, will be distributed free to 10,000 Heathrow travelers, and then be available for sale through Amazon’s British Web site and traditional bookstores for £8.99 (about $15). The author retains the rights to the book and — on all but those 10,000 free copies — will earn royalties from it.
The stunt is the brainchild of Heathrow’s public relations agency, Mischief of London, which might make creative-control purists wince. But Mr. de Botton said in a telephone interview that while Heathrow was paying him the equivalent of a book advance (he declined to reveal the amount) and paying for his hotel and meals, he was autonomous.
“Right from the start I said I can only do this if you don’t even see the text before it goes to print,” Mr. de Botton said of his negotiations with Heathrow. “I said, ‘If I find a cockroach in the restaurant, if someone drops dead at the airport, I’m going to write about it and send it to the publisher.’ They just took a big gulp and then to their credit they said, ‘Fine, yes, you can say anything you want.’ ”
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For Heathrow, that may sound like Russian roulette, but Dan Glover, a creative director at Mischief, said in a telephone interview, “If we funded a brochure that said how wonderful the airport was, people would switch off because they’d think they’re being marketed to.”
Mr. Glover added in an e-mail message that the purpose of the campaign was to stimulate “branded conversations” among travelers “through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport — and potentially being a character in the book — and by receiving an exclusive copy to read on your travels. The overarching objective is to make a passenger’s time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip.”
For Heathrow, any buzz will counter the drone of complaints about long lines, which reached a peak in March 2008, when the long-anticipated opening of Terminal 5 resulted in days of delays that The Guardian described as “chaos” and The Scotsman as “shambolic.”
“They’re not looking for someone to say the airport is brilliant,” Mr. de Botton said. “They’re looking for someone to say the airport is interesting — that the airport is more than, ‘There’s a long security queue.’ It’s almost as if their only goal is that something else is going to be said about the airport.”
As for how Mr. de Botton will deliver the manuscript to his publisher by the end of August, he said the book, which will feature many photographs and be only 112 pages, will run as short as 20,000 words (magazine articles often run over 10,000). He also said he made previous excursions to the airport and is “assembling bits now.”
One vignette provided to The New York Times describes divorced fathers waiting for children to arrive, with Mr. de Botton writing, “There were men pacing impatiently and blankly near Costa Coffee for an hour (just to be sure of not missing an unheralded early arrival), who had looked forward to this moment for half a year and could no longer restrain themselves at the sight of a small boy endowed with their own grey-green eyes and their mother’s cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless steel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.”
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Other writers were considered, but “Alain bit our arms off to be involved in the project,” said Cat Jordan, a Heathrow spokeswoman, adding that he had a track record, having published “The Art of Travel,” on the subject.
Heathrow will review photos before publication for “security issues,” but will be hands off with the text, she said.
“No one expects everything all of the time to be perfect,” Ms. Jordan said. “If I wanted that, I might as well pay for a traditional marketing campaign, but what I wanted here was something with a little more emotion. Heathrow doesn’t have a lot to hide, and there’s a lot of emotion here every day with people saying hello and goodbye, and we hope he captures just a little bit of that.”
Mr. de Botton said the project recalled an era when patrons underwrote artists and writers.
“That one of the largest organizations in the U.K. should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet,” Mr. de Botton said. “On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it’s nice that writers seem to matter.”
Mr. de Botton, in fact, is already fantasizing about more posts.
“I’d like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station,” he said.
From: the New York Times
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