Humptulips! Skykomish! Yakima! Duwamish! Kitsap! These names of places are the legacy of a 10,000 year history of oral storytelling on the Pacific Northwest Coast and the foundation of Seattle’s literary identity. While many of these stories were lost in the final westward push of Manifest Destiny, the words born in the languages of First Peoples live on in the region’s novels, poems, and stories.

Vi Hilbert, a member of the Skagit Tribe, managed to rescue the language Lushootseed from oblivion before she died, publishing dictionaries and collections of stories. The works of Seattle’s most acclaimed writer, National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie, including Indian Killer and The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, remain some of the best introductions to the cloud-covered city on Puget Sound. Other Seattle writers who happen to claim Native heritage include popular novelist Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain) and gutsy memoirist Elissa Washuta (My Body is a Book of Rules).

It’s the sense of community that’s most striking about Seattle’s literary life

When pioneers of European heritage first settled into the mud of this conifer-dense collection of seven hills, they came bearing America’s East Coast and Midwestern cultural identities on their backs. They decided that Seattle would be a city of the future, looking ever Eastward to the Pacific Rim. Murray Morgan’s Skid Road remains the go-to account of the city’s ribald founding by drunken, philandering visionaries determined to establish a city that could one day rival those of the East Coast. Nowadays that vision is manifest, with a skyline feasted upon by construction cranes, as Seattle endures its new status as America’s fastest-growing city – thanks in no small part to serving as home to Amazon.

Seattle was a frequent hangout spot for the Beats, and the Blue Moon Tavern, where Kerouac spent time, still stands. When Allen Ginsberg wandered through town in February of 1956, he recorded his impressions of this maritime trading post flowing with five-cent beer and commerce in his poem Afternoon Seattle:



Seattle! - department stores full of fur coats and camping equipment, mad noontime businessmen in gabardine coats talking on street corners to keep up the structure, I float past, birds cry

Beyond the grid teeming with business deals, the mountains, islands, and rivers that hug the city practically demand to be immortalised in poetry. The young poets hunched over MacBooks in Capitol Hill’s cafes today belong to a tradition established by Seattle poets like Carolyn Kizer, Theodore Roethke, and Richard Hugo. The new generation of Seattle poets, including Sarah Galvin, Karen Finneyfrock, and Rich Smith (no longer based in the city), belong to a literary community accustomed to performing to word-stoned audiences on stages like the cabaret at Hugo House and the Fireside Room at the Sorrento Hotel, purported to be haunted by the ghost of one-time resident Alice B Toklas. Seattle is also home to one of America’s only bookstores devoted entirely to poetry, Open Books.

Where nature and technology coexist ... Photograph: Natalie Tepper/Corbis

It’s the sense of community that’s most striking about Seattle’s literary life. With a population of around 650,000, it’s still small enough for book nerds to continually bump into each other, whether at the palatial Elliott Bay Book Company or during riotous events like the APRIL Festival or LitCrawl. It’s also a city that welcomes recent arrivals, like Maria Semple, whose comic novel Where’d You Go Bernadette skewers the pretentions of this tech-mad metropolis.

Nature and technology coexist in this mossy notch of the lower 48 more harmoniously than in other American cities. The next time you use Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Excel, know that coho and chinook salmon spawned a few hundred yards from the offices where that software was hatched.

The region’s wilds continue to inspire memoirists and essayists. Jonathan Raban, a transplant from Norfolk, UK who has made the Northwest his subject and home, traverses both geography and an unraveling marriage in Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. Fellow Brit Lesley Hazelton, whose books on religion and culture include The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad, writes from a classically Seattle setting, a houseboat on Lake Union. Tim Egan, a New York Times columnist, meditates on the nature and history of the region in both fiction and nonfiction, including The Good Rain.

It makes sense that such a future-obsessed city would be fertile breeding ground for science fiction and fantasy. George RR Martin and Neil Gaiman are among the big-hitters of speculative fiction who have led sessions at Clarion West writers’ workshop, which counts among its alumni Octavia Butler, Kij Johnson, and Cat Rambo. Frank Herbert, who lived in nearby Port Angeles, established himself as a giant in the genre with Dune and its sequels. From nearby Vashon Island, Neal Stephenson continues to deliver post-cyberpunk doorstoppers like Cryptonomicon, Anatheum, and the Baroque Cycle.



If Seattle were said to have a literary grandfather, that figure would most certainly be Tom Robbins, the verbal acrobat whose novels speak to the psychedelic, mystical sensibilities that find a perfect home in the Northwest. As Robbins once remarked, “to some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.”