Low-income writers and those without space to work will be prioritised under the RSL’s new Scriptorium awards, with 10 people a year allowed to stay for up to a month

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.”