Passengers passing through Heathrow will hear announcements with a difference this week as one of the world’s most respected authors reads extracts from his latest book through the airport tannoy system.
Alain de Botton, who last month completed his residency as Heathrow’s writer-in-residence, now becomes the airport’s first ever reader-in-residence conducting unprompted readings to thousands of domestic and international travellers to mark the launch of the completed book.
During his residency, de Botton was given unprecedented and unrestricted access to all areas of the airport with the resulting book – A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary – providing a sideways look at the inner workings of Britain’s only hub airport. Parts of the book were written at a desk in Terminal 5 and a number of staff and passengers at the airport have ended up as characters in the book.
Although the book was commissioned by Heathrow, the author has maintained full creative control over every aspect of the project with airport executives only receiving the manuscript after it had been sent to print.
Colin Matthews, Heathrow’s CEO comments:
“Heathrow is one of the world’s great meeting places, where people and cultures come and go on a daily basis, underpinning a powerful network of global connections on which the UK thrives. People and cultures come and go generating millions of individual stories of reunion and separation, beginnings and endings. We are looking forward to reading Alain de Botton’s account of the Heathrow story.”
Alain de Botton comments:
“I had one of the most interesting summers of my life as the writer-in-residence at Heathrow. All of life is here: globalisation, high technology, complex management structures, consumerism, environmental challenges. Four weeks after starting to write, with a finished book in hand, I'm delighted to come back to Heathrow as the reader-in-residence. I'll be reading different bits of my book to passengers at the airport.”
10,000 exclusive copies of A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary will be given out to Heathrow passengers before the book goes on general sale in bookshops around the country from September 28th 2009.
