Drinkers With Writing Problems

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Travel to places where drinking culture and creative legacies collide. This series reveals how the histories of beer, wine and spirits are linked to the work of trail-blazing writers. Roving on both sides of the Atlantic, a veteran journalist follows in the footsteps of a few famous scribblers – mee…

Scott Thomas Anderson


    • Nov 18, 2024 LATEST EPISODE
    • infrequent NEW EPISODES
    • 1h 9m AVG DURATION
    • 9 EPISODES
    • 2 SEASONS


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    Latest episodes from Drinkers With Writing Problems

    Writing the Mob and endings in Las Vegas

    Play Episode Listen Later Nov 18, 2024 92:29


    It's a city that doens't flinch - or forgive. Las Vegas found its halcyon days at the end of skimming rackets and growing criminal ambition, but the writers who tried to make sense of its story faced a wavering desert mirage of America's secrets. That reflection remains strong in the city's cocktail bars and craft distilleries, while its smokier rooms are haunted by memories of creative outcasts on a collision course with their own demons. 

    Soldiers, spies and misfits of Gibraltar

    Play Episode Listen Later Mar 13, 2023 70:14


    Have a drink with the only troop of wild monkeys in Europe. The Royal Crown colony of Gibraltar remains one of the Old World's enigmas – a cauldron of cultures and empires simmering together under the low-lit flame of History itself. Gibraltar is also a port where weary sailors, restless soldiers and drifters engaged in espionage have found themselves stranded over time. Episode 9 explores how the contours of this colony intersected with the lives of three drink-loving writers, as well as how the legacy of cider, sherry, spying and warfare connects with their stories that were penned about a high rock over the sea.    

    England's Lake District

    Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2022 42:25


    Come along on a hike and pub crawl through the most spell-binding landscape in Britain's northwest: Writers have been gravitating to the Lake District for generations, their imaginations enthralled by its serene and stunning views, their senses on guard for the blustery, foreboding power of its skies. The district's dynamism fostered one of Literature's greatest partnerships; but the restless, drink-loving half of that duo eventually started veering through darker doorways of the human mind.

    Boomtowns of the American West

    Play Episode Listen Later Jan 19, 2022 116:16


    Season 2 opens with a return to the California Gold Rush and Nevada Silver Strike, exploring how these discoveries in the 19th century lured every kind of drifter and dreamer to America's lawless edge of the world. Through the dusty violence and ominous mineshaft darkness, three writers emerged to capture a brazen, boom-and-bust spirit of the age. Their own drink-soaked stories – some inspiring, some funny, some tragic – have now seeped into the bones of bars, saloons and hotels that remain from northern California to western Nevada; and into a force we call the Literature of the West. 

    Lost in Lorca's Spain

    Play Episode Listen Later Oct 19, 2020 58:49


    Season 1 ends with a sojourn to the southern corners of Iberia, chasing the elusive memory of one of the greatest Spanish writers to ever take up the pen. He was a literary folk hero in the wine-splashed tapas bars from Seville to Granada; and when forces within the Spanish Civil War caused him to disappear, it set the stage for a national haunting as dark as any of his poetry. Travel to the barrios and hill towns that he called home – and to the place where some are still searching for his body to this very day.   

    Los Angeles & Old Hollywood

    Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2020 76:15


    In a place known for dark alleys, dream factories and California sunshine, there are a few bars and hotels that hold the secret to how one city captured the world’s imagination. Take a stroll through those surviving landmarks, the places where a handful of writers watched Los Angeles rumble to life between Prohibition and the 1950s: They were hard-drinking personalities who changed the face of the West Coast – and their typewriters were blazing as they challenged the censors, crystalized the city and worked under the shadow of an ever-entrancing murder.    

    The City of New Orleans

    Play Episode Listen Later Mar 24, 2020 66:12


    Welcome to The City that Care Forgot, the place where an exiled teen once returned to study a spilling kaleidoscope of cocktails as he re-vamped gothic literature. In time, his connections to the South’s strangest river port helped trigger a national obsession with the true crime genre. Then, explore how gin-distilling went legit in the birthplace of Jazz – and how it fueled a wordsmith who channeled the lonely beauty of a night in New Orleans. Finally, venture down a rabbit hole in search of the Big Easy’s lost genius of comedy. Born and raised in the city, he haunted drinking dens, wrote a masterpiece and wandered the same streets as a presidential assassin.  

    Edinburgh & Islay

    Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2020 51:31


    When a son of Scotland’s most-medieval city channeled its legacies of vice and bloodshed into popular tales, he took inspiration from the link between its shadowy pub culture and innovations in urban brewing. Following his path through Edinburgh’s old taverns reveals his influence on the city’s growing stable of mystery writers. Further off shore, Scotland’s famed whisky island is holding its own book festival, including inside its legendary distilleries. Between cold winds and drams of Scotch, visitors can see how this Hebridean isolation helped a writer in the 1940s conjure a vision of the future that’s become more haunting with every passing year.   

    Dublin & Belfast

    Play Episode Listen Later Dec 13, 2019 47:58


    In Dublin, the story of an I.R.A. insurgent-turned-writer leads to historic watering holes where the city’s oldest whiskeys flow. The man who first declared himself “a drinker with a writing problem” understood what distilled spirits mean to a culture’s identity; but it was his understanding of how to overcome a violent past that makes his words especially relevant. Meanwhile, in Belfast, a small but daring group of crime novelists are using timeless pubs and pints of Guinness to confront decades of real-life killings in their city.

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