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Book Box: Inside the Silk Road Slippers Writing Masterclass in Marrakech
Alexandra Pringle emphasises the value of literary masterclasses, where writers refine their work amidst luxury and camaraderie in Marrakech.
Dear Reader,
“The thing about literary masterclasses is you have to give value — real value,” says Alexandra Pringle, former Editor-in-Chief of Bloomsbury, in the authoritative tone of a woman who has spent decades publishing Nobel prizewinners like Abdulrazak Gurnah and bestsellers like Eat, Pray, Love.
We are sitting at a dinner feast under the Moroccan stars, bathed in the light of a thousand candles. Literally. Toasting our togetherness, eating lamb with hot, crusty bread and home-grown greens. This is as dreamy and five-star as a masterclass could be, the equivalent of a luxury cruise for literature, where instead of champagne buffets you get story structure, and instead of on-board entertainment you get lessons on texture and tonality.
Pringle runs the Silk Road Slippers Masterclass alongside Faiza S. Khan and Alex von Tunzelmann, both literary stars in their own right. Added to this constellation are guest authors like Colum McCann, Samantha Harvey, and Maggie O’Farrell. This week, we have with us the Somali-British novelist Nadifa Mohamed. She talks about her debut book Black Mamba Boy and her Booker prize shortlisted novel The Fortune Men.
So what’s not to swoon over?
Rather a lot, it appears.
A few days into the program we compare notes — the only man on the course, a Swiss investor who wants to be a writer, and me.
“On Monday night I was ready to leave,” says the serious-faced finance man.
“Me too,” I echo, nodding vigorously.
“I suppose I can give it all up and turn to planting lettuce and tomatoes in Manali,” I tell myself after a bruising read-aloud of my story synopsis to a table full of people who look faintly puzzled and give me strained smiles.
“It’s a stupid idea, why did I ever think this story about a book club and a home in the Himalayas would work? This is what comes of being a writer and working in a vacuum — you lose touch with reality,” I tell myself as I walk back to my villa room.
The path through olive trees, garden lights and swimming pools - the Moroccan rugs, urns and art on the walls, none of it does anything to cheer me up; each detail a reminder that even paradise cannot protect you from narrative humiliation.
Disconnecting myself from the luxury of my room, I spend the night doing rewrites.
The next morning, as we work on our Julia Cameron-inspired morning pages, drinking coffee and Moroccan mint tea and sitting around the rectangular table, I am surprised to find other writers have been doing the same - throwing away their first drafts and starting to redraft their second. The author of the Beirut orphan memoir is restructuring her timeline. The professor writing about her Czech double-agent mother is adding emotional depth. The novel about children and the Mexican drug cartels is being entirely re-outlined. All of us are scrapping our first drafts.
Then it is time for a break. But even as we walk through the narrow souks of the ancient medina of Marrakech, sitting in rug shops and drinking tea in a twelfth-century riad, our rewrites form in brains. We talk. About what works and what doesn’t work.
“I don’t have enough emotion in my first draft,”
“I’m spending too long on the minor characters”
“I find it hard to write anything personal,”
It is like group therapy, but with carpets. Who knew the first lesson of a luxury writing retreat would be humility?
By the end of the week, we have all internalized our instructors - the tone, the structure, the ruthless precision and the nurture - and are now applying it not only to our stories but to each other’s existential crises. The rewrites, when we read them aloud, sound tighter and sharper. Plots and characters that were only in our heads have made it onto the page. We end up deeply engaged with everybody’s stories. This writerly path is going to be long and full of edits, and we need all the help we can get.
Silk Road Slippers will be hosting writing masterclasses in both London and Marrakech through 2026. For more information, visit silkroadslippers.com
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Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal
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