A masterclass on writing cities with Elena Medel - with a poetic twist

Well, hello there, and I hope that we have all have managed to recover from the festivities of the new year. We're back, and this post dives deep into a subject that I strongly believe in from the bottom of my heart - a creative writing workshop on writing about cities with Elena Medel, which took place on the 26th of January 2026 from 10:30am to 3:00pm at the British Library in London.

As is customary of each and every blog post of this nature, I shall start by giving some introductions as to who is Elena. Elena Medel is an award-winning Spanish poet and writer, who started writing her first poem, My First Bikini (Mi primer bikini) in 2001, before going on to write a couple more poems over the years (including Chatterton, which won the Loewe Young Poets prize in 2014), and eventually getting around to releasing her first novel, The Wonders (Las Maravillas) in 2020, which was translated into 15 languages, and released to positive acclaim from a wide range of journals and publications. 

More recently, Elena was nominated as a finalist for the 2025 Eccles Institute and Hay Festival Global Writers Award, an award that is aimed at celebrating written literature on subjects related to the Americas, and in more personal terms, is the second award-winning fiction writer that I have met on my creative writing journey, after first meeting Amanda Hodgkinson at the end of 2023.

So, without further ado, let's get going, and for this event, I am going to try something a little bit different to the walls of prose that I would usually write on my blog posts, and that is, that I am going to write a poem about the whole experience of the event, and its aftermaths. I've never tried writing a poem before, so let's see how this goes.

Writing about cities with Elena Medel: a poem

London is calling again
The grand red building of the British Library is waiting
With stories that are ready to be expressed
And stories that are ready to be shared
All through the entrance doors ahead of us.

The British Library Conservation Centre

The eerie silence greeted me in the Foyle
Silence then turned to floods of people,
    ready to write
The question,
Are we map writers?
Or compass writers?

The theme of people and power started to come alive
An 18 year old, riding the buses of Córdoba
Coming across what seemed to be a former classmate
But the classmate turned out to be a dud
The actual classmate living elsewhere.

It goes to show,
That ordinary life can be hard to comprehend
Personal life means one thing,
Working life means a different thing
So much so that you sometimes lose sense of time.

Then we began writing postcards
To show pride in our places
To promote culture and language
To counter the negative stereotypes
And most importantly, to generate new stories

My take on the writing exercise

Food had all sorts of amazing wonders
But then, 
It was back to the wonders of literature
Uncomfortable tales followed us in The End of Alice
Followed by tales of 1950s life under the Spanish dictatorship

Maravillas starts to come to light
Two women coming from very different backgrounds
Growing up with families in Córdoba
Moving cities many years apart
And where one Madrid becomes several Madrid's

The Madrid locations associated with the Maravillas characters (photo used with Elena's permission)

More writing prompts were staring at us
But our projects were instead beckoning us
Fantasy continents started springing up to mind
It made people feel proud
And made me feel more determined

Writing turns into sightseeing
Riding the DLR out to the Docklands
Where apartment buildings are stacking up 
      on the Royal Wharf
And massive skyscrapers are beckoning ahead of us,
Boats plying their way up and down the Thames

Now, it is time for a stroll to the deepest reaches

The Royal Docks crossed over by bridges
Planes at City Airport screeching away
Until the journey’s end at Gallions Reach
Where home too, starts to be within reach.

With the poem over, how does the event play out?

Wow is simply one word that I would use to describe this event. I think Elena did a really good job explaining the methodology that she used to write Las Maravillas and getting the chance to hear about the personal stories from her life in Spain, and the mysterious stories used in other places that inspired her to write the novel. And let's not forget the "I remember" quote from Georges Perec - to me, this concept bears a striking similarity to the "I am not telling you" writing exercise from one of Amanda's workshops in that it is forcing you to have to think about all the things that are out there in your world.

The writing prompt in terms of writing a postcard about the places where we came from was really interesting, as the prompt tied in really well with Elena's themes of power, class and struggle, and because it made us think out of the box and think about not just the glamour, glitz and the fame that define places, but also to think about the ordinary life that people in these places have to go through. 

In terms of the time that was used to discuss our city-related projects in lieu of the writing prompts, I wasn't too sure going into the event if that concept was going to work out at all, but to my surprise, Elena pulled off the concept really well - there was such a diverse range of projects that the event participants had in mind, and it was so fascinating hearing what they had to say and the ideas that were spread around the room to make their projects even better. Of course, in relation to my project, I will take Elena's idea of looking at South American writers for contemporary fantasy mapping to heart.

With that, I hope you have enjoyed my poetic take on the event, and I shall see you on the next fantasy mapping adventure!

For now, take care.

Jakub