In the ninth of our dispatches from A Room for London – a hotel installation in the shape of the boat in Joseph Conrad's novella The Heart of Darkness – we hear from the Nigerian-American writer and street photographer Teju Cole.
For four days every month, as part of a year-long project by Artangel, a writer is invited to stay in the boat, which is moored on top of London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, tasked only with writing an essay on the theme of London, rivers and/or Conrad. For Cole, the boat's position halfway between the Olympic celebrations on the street and the surveillance helicopters in the sky, recalls another occasion in another city - a dinner party with VS Naipaul in New York.
