Some cities have literature in their soil. You walk down a street and feel the ghost of a novel you once read. You turn a corner and recognize it from a poem. The best literary cities are not simply places where famous writers lived, though many of them are. They are places where the city itself becomes a character, shaping the stories told about it and within it, feeding writers with material that could not have come from anywhere else.

I have spent years visiting cities through the lens of their literary histories, and I have found that the most rewarding literary destinations are not always the most obvious ones. Paris and London make every list, and they deserve to. But some of the most interesting literary cities are places you might not think of immediately. This is my personal, opinionated tour of cities that belong on every book lover’s travel list.

Dublin, Ireland

I will start with Dublin because no city on Earth has produced more literary output per capita, and I do not think it is close. Four Nobel Prize winners in literature came from this relatively small city: Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney (who was born in Northern Ireland but lived and worked in Dublin for decades). Joyce, Wilde, Stoker, Swift, Behan, Bowen, O’Brien, Banville. The list goes on and on, and it is absurd.

What makes Dublin special as a literary city is that the literary culture is not preserved in amber. It is alive. Walk into any pub in the city center on a given evening and there is a reasonable chance someone nearby is working on a novel. The spoken word scene is extraordinary. Poetry readings happen in basements and bookshops and the back rooms of bars. The Dublin Writers Festival, the Dalkey Book Festival, and a dozen smaller events throughout the year keep the conversation going.

For visitors, the obvious pilgrimage is Bloomsday on June 16th, when the city retraces Leopold Bloom’s journey through Joyce’s Ulysses. I have done it twice. The first time, I was moved by how seriously Dubliners take their literary heritage. The second time, I was more interested in the pubs, which, to be fair, is also very Joycean.

Do not skip the Chester Beatty Library, which houses one of the finest collections of manuscripts and rare books in the world. And visit Sweny’s Pharmacy, still operating as a bookshop and cultural space, where Bloom bought a bar of lemon soap in Ulysses. You can still buy lemon soap there. I did.

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Buenos Aires has more bookstores per capita than any other city in the world. This statistic gets cited frequently, but experiencing it firsthand is something else entirely. There are bookshops everywhere. In shopping malls, on quiet residential streets, in converted theaters and old mansions. The Ateneo Grand Splendid, a former theater converted into a bookstore, is one of the most photographed retail spaces on the planet, and it earns the attention.

But the literary culture of Buenos Aires runs deeper than its bookstores. This is the city of Borges, who reimagined what fiction could do with labyrinths, mirrors, and infinite libraries. Walking through the San Telmo or Palermo neighborhoods, you can feel the density of literary history. Borges set stories on specific corners. Julio Cortazar’s characters haunted specific cafes. The city and its literature are entangled in a way that makes the real and fictional versions blur together.

The reading culture is genuinely popular, not elite. On the subway (the Subte), you will see people reading paperbacks during their commute. The annual Feria del Libro, held in La Rural exhibition center, attracts over a million visitors across three weeks. A million people at a book fair. In a country with significant economic challenges. That tells you something about how deeply reading is embedded in the culture.

I spent a week in Buenos Aires three years ago and came home with a suitcase heavy with books. Most were in Spanish, which I read slowly. I have finished about half of them. The rest are part of my tsundoku collection, and I regret nothing.

Edinburgh, Scotland

Edinburgh was the first city designated as a UNESCO City of Literature, in 2004, and the honor was well earned. The city has been producing world-class writers since at least the 18th century, when the Scottish Enlightenment made Edinburgh one of the intellectual capitals of Europe.

The literary geography of Edinburgh is extraordinary. You can stand on the Royal Mile and look in one direction toward the birthplace of Walter Scott, then turn around and see the pub where Robert Louis Stevenson drank while working on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Old Town, with its narrow closes and underground vaults, is essentially a gothic novel rendered in stone.

Modern Edinburgh is equally rich. Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels have mapped the city’s underbelly with the precision of a forensic investigator. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting gave voice to a part of Edinburgh that the tourist brochures preferred to ignore. Alexander McCall Smith set his 44 Scotland Street series in the New Town, capturing the comedy and warmth of a particular slice of Edinburgh life.

The Edinburgh International Book Festival, held every August as part of the broader Edinburgh Festival, is the largest public book festival in the world. I have attended three times, and each time I came away with a reading list that took months to get through. The festival takes place in Charlotte Square Gardens, and there is something magical about sitting in a tent on a Scottish summer afternoon (fleece jacket required, even in August) listening to an author read from their latest work.

Also worth mentioning: the Elephant House cafe, where J.K. Rowling reportedly wrote portions of the early Harry Potter books. It burned in a fire in 2021 but was restored and remains a place of pilgrimage for fans.

Tokyo, Japan

Tokyo does not always appear on Western-centric literary city lists, and that is a glaring omission. Japanese literature is among the richest and most distinctive in the world, and Tokyo has been at the center of it for centuries.

Start with the bookstores. Jimbocho, a neighborhood in Chiyoda, has the highest concentration of used and antiquarian bookshops in the world. Over 170 bookstores line the streets, some specializing in genres as narrow as prewar Japanese maps or Meiji-era poetry collections. You could spend a week in Jimbocho and not visit every shop. The books are overwhelmingly in Japanese, obviously, but the experience of being surrounded by that density of printed matter is something every book lover should have at least once.

Tokyo’s literary connections are everywhere once you start looking. Haruki Murakami’s novels are practically a walking guide to the city. The jazz bars, the parks, the quiet residential streets where his lonely protagonists wander. Natsume Soseki, one of the greatest Japanese novelists, lived and set many of his works in Tokyo. His face was on the 1000-yen note until 2004, which tells you how seriously Japan takes its literary figures.

For contemporary literary culture, visit Daikanyama T-Site, a bookstore and cultural complex that represents the best of Japanese design applied to the book-buying experience. It is beautiful, serene, and intelligently curated. Also seek out the small independent bookshops in Shimokitazawa, a neighborhood that feels like the literary bohemia of Tokyo, with its secondhand stores, tiny theaters, and coffee shops full of people reading.

Paris, France

I know, I know. Paris is the obvious choice. But sometimes the obvious choice is obvious for good reasons.

The literary history of Paris is so dense that you could organize your entire trip around it and never run out of things to see. Hemingway’s Left Bank. Proust’s Madeleine. Hugo’s Notre-Dame. Baudelaire’s boulevards. Sartre and de Beauvoir at Les Deux Magots. The list is genuinely endless, spanning centuries and dozens of literary movements.

What I find most appealing about Paris as a literary city today is the persistence of its bookshop culture. While chain bookstores have decimated independent shops in many countries, France’s fixed book pricing law (the Lang Law of 1981) has protected small booksellers. Independent bookshops thrive across the city, from the famous Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank to tiny specialty shops in the Marais and Belleville.

The bouquinistes, the open-air booksellers along the Seine, have been there since the 16th century. Their green wooden boxes, affixed to the stone parapets of the river, are a UNESCO-recognized part of the city’s heritage. Most of the stock is touristy (postcards, prints, secondhand paperbacks), but dedicated browsers can still find genuine treasures, especially in the stalls closer to the Ile de la Cite.

One underrated Paris literary experience: the reading rooms of the Bibliotheque nationale de France. The Richelieu site, recently renovated, is one of the most beautiful library spaces in the world. You do not need to be a researcher to visit. Just walk in and look up at the ceiling of the Salle Labrouste. It will change how you think about what a library can be.

Oaxaca, Mexico

Oaxaca might surprise you on this list. It is not a city typically associated with major literary figures. But it has one of the most interesting and active literary cultures of any city I have visited in recent years.

The city has a long tradition of independent publishing and printmaking. The graphic arts scene in Oaxaca is extraordinary, and it intersects with literature in beautiful ways. Small presses produce limited-edition books with hand-printed illustrations. Poetry chapbooks are sold alongside prints and woodcuts in the galleries around the Zocalo.

Oaxaca is also home to a growing number of writer residency programs, drawing authors from across Latin America and beyond. The multilingual literary scene, with work being produced in Spanish, Zapotec, Mixtec, and other indigenous languages, gives the city a linguistic richness that few places can match.

Visit the Biblioteca de Investigacion Juan de Cordova, which houses a remarkable collection of documents related to indigenous languages. Visit the bookshops along Alcala street. And if you time your trip for the Feria del Libro Oaxaca, you will find a book festival that has the energy and warmth of the city itself: colorful, welcoming, and utterly unlike the more formal festivals of Europe.

St. Petersburg, Russia

St. Petersburg is the city of Dostoevsky, and walking through it, you understand why his novels feel the way they do. The long northern light, the canals, the ornate facades hiding cramped apartments, the sense of grandeur built on suffering. Raskolnikov’s neighborhood in Crime and Punishment is real. You can walk from his apartment to the pawnbroker’s. The distances match. Dostoevsky mapped his fiction onto the actual city with obsessive precision.

But St. Petersburg’s literary heritage extends far beyond Dostoevsky. Pushkin, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Brodsky, Nabokov (who was born here). The city has produced an astonishing number of major writers, many of whom were in conversation with each other and with the city itself. The literary history is inseparable from the political history, which gives it a weight and intensity that few other cities can match.

The Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House is one of the most moving literary sites I have visited anywhere. Akhmatova lived in a wing of the Sheremetev Palace for decades, through revolution and war and political persecution. The museum recreates her living space and documents her extraordinary courage in continuing to write when doing so was literally dangerous.

For book buyers, Nevsky Prospekt has the famous Dom Knigi (House of Books), housed in the former Singer Sewing Machine building, one of the most beautiful commercial buildings in the city. The bookshop occupies multiple floors and has an excellent selection of Russian literature in translation.

Portland, Oregon

I include Portland partly because I know it well and partly because it represents something important: a mid-sized American city that has built a genuine literary culture from the ground up, mostly in the last forty years.

Powell’s City of Books is the anchor. Occupying an entire city block in the Pearl District, it is the largest independent new-and-used bookstore in the world. I have spent entire days there and not covered every section. The color-coded room system (the Gold Room, the Purple Room, the Rose Room) has become a kind of local geography. When Portland residents give directions, they sometimes reference Powell’s rooms as landmarks.

But Portland’s literary scene goes well beyond one bookstore. The city has an unusually high density of independent bookshops, including specialty stores for science fiction, comics, children’s books, and rare editions. The literary reading series scene is active, with events happening most nights of the week across the city. Tin House magazine (now Tin House Books) was based here for years and helped establish Portland as a serious literary hub.

The MFA programs at Portland State University and nearby colleges feed a steady stream of young writers into the city’s literary ecosystem. Many stay after graduation, drawn by the relatively affordable cost of living (compared to New York or San Francisco, at least) and the community of writers already in place. Portland proves that literary culture can be built intentionally, through investment in bookstores, reading series, small presses, and educational institutions.

Tangier, Morocco

Tangier’s literary history is specific and strange, which is part of its appeal. In the 1950s and 1960s, the city attracted a remarkable collection of writers drawn by its status as an international zone, its relative permissiveness, its cheap living costs, and its distance from the literary establishments of New York, London, and Paris.

Paul Bowles lived in Tangier for over fifty years, writing novels and translating Moroccan literature. William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a room in the Medina that you can still visit (it is now part of a boutique hotel). Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Jean Genet all spent time here. The Beats, in particular, found in Tangier a kind of creative freedom that postwar America did not offer.

Today, Tangier is experiencing a cultural renaissance. New bookshops and cultural spaces have opened in the Medina and the Ville Nouvelle. The Tangier American Legation Museum, the only historic landmark the U.S. government owns on foreign soil, hosts literary events and exhibitions. The Librairie des Colonnes, a legendary French-language bookshop on the Boulevard Pasteur, has been restored and expanded.

Tangier is also a starting point for understanding North African literature more broadly, a tradition that is rich, politically engaged, and often underrepresented in Western literary conversations. Writers like Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mohamed Choukri, and Leila Slimani have roots in or connections to Morocco, and their work adds depth to any visit.

How to Be a Literary Traveler

A few practical suggestions for getting the most out of a literary city visit.

Read before you go. This sounds obvious, but it makes an enormous difference. Walking through Dublin after reading Joyce is a completely different experience from walking through Dublin cold. The places come alive when you have their literary associations loaded in your mind. I try to read at least two or three books connected to a city before visiting.

Visit bookshops early in your trip, not as an afterthought on the last day. Local booksellers can point you toward writers and books connected to the city that you might not have encountered otherwise. Tell them you are interested in the city’s literary culture. They will have recommendations.

Attend a reading or literary event if timing allows. Even if the reading is in a language you do not understand, the experience of watching an audience respond to literature in a different cultural context is valuable. The rhythms of literary culture vary enormously from place to place, and you only learn this by participating.

Buy local books. Bring home translations of writers you discover in situ. Some of my most treasured reading discoveries came from books I found in local bookstores while traveling. A novel by an Oaxacan writer that I never would have encountered in an American bookshop. A collection of short stories by a Tokyo author whose work had not been translated into English but whose Japanese-language edition had beautiful cover art that I could not resist.

And leave room in your suitcase. You will need it. Every literary city will send you home with more books than you arrived with. That is, perhaps, the surest sign that you have been somewhere worth visiting.

For reading that brings literary worlds to life wherever you are, explore the ScrollWorks Media catalog. Our authors write about place with the kind of specificity that makes you feel you have been there, from the archival corridors of The Last Archive to the geographic puzzles of The Cartographer’s Dilemma.

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