Tragedy has forced me to move on from Julian Assange
Being a ghostwriter for the controversial WikiLeaks exile was a chastening experience for Andrew O'Hagan. The Grenfell Tower fire has given him a new sense of purpose
Stephen McGinty
June 25 2017, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
O'Hagan will take a break from writing to appear at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August
Andrew O'Hagan lives in an arts and crafts-style house in Primrose Hill, northwest London, where he works in an upstairs study. It is furnished with matching sofas, a large fireplace, overhung by an oil painting once dismissed by a previous girlfriend as a "bleak Scots puddle" and not one, nor two, but three different writing desks.
While there are few writers in Britain as skilled as the novelist, essayist and author of superlative non-fiction, it cannot be explained by furnishings alone. Yet each desk has a different purpose. "One's for fiction, one's for non-fiction and the other is for general admin," he explains with a chuckle.
The fiction desk is where Caledonian Road is slowly taking shape, a huge state-of-the-nation novel, inspired by the street…