The life-changing power of letter-writing

Words: Agatha Zarzycki
Illustrations: Laurindo Feliciano

It started in 2002. Shaun Usher met his future wife weeks before she moved to Spain for ten months as part of a university course. Before she left, they decided to write letters to each other. “We wouldn’t have learned about one another as quickly by emailing or phoning,” says Usher. “There’s something about putting pen to paper that really opens you up.”

The couple fell in love by letter – and Usher fell in love with letter writing. He pored over anthologies and biographies and connected with archivists working in museums and universities around the world. Seven years later, he started Letters of Note, a website devoted to old-fashioned correspondence ‘deserving a wider audience’. “My obsession had become so big, I couldn’t contain it anymore,” says Usher. “I just had to share it.”

Creating Letters Live

He thought only his family would read the blog, which features letters by everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Marilyn Monroe, but millions of monthly visitors proved him wrong. In 2013, Letters of Note became a global bestselling book. The same year, Usher’s publisher Jamie Byng (CEO of Canongate) had the idea to bring it to the stage, creating Letters Live. “Byng knows a lot of amazing people, so he asked some of his friends to come and read,” says Usher. Said friends included Benedict Cumberbatch, Gillian Anderson and Nick Cave, who performed at the first Letters Live event at The Tabernacle in West London.

From its inception, speakers are kept under wraps until you’re sitting in your seat and a voice announces, “Please welcome to the stage, Olivia Colman.” There’s nothing quite like that thrill,” says Usher. “As producers, we always stand in the wings, waiting to see people’s reactions.”

Cumberbatch is now a co-producer, alongside Adam Ackland, and continues to join the hundreds of performers who have captivated audiences at more than 80 shows worldwide, from the historic Town Hall in Midtown, Manhattan – created by suffragists in 1921 – to the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp outside Calais, France in aid of Choose Love (formerly Help Refugees), one of the charities Letters Live has supported.

Laughter and tears

For the events, Usher has read tens of thousands of letters, but only one in 50 will be stage worthy. “If it excites me, moves me, brings me to tears either through laughter or sadness, reminds me of a particular moment in time, highlights something I’ve never thought of or didn’t know much about – these are all reasons to put it on the shortlist,” he explains.

Asking him about letters with a travel theme, he brings up one by Dylan Thomas to his patron Margaret Taylor, written on the Italian island of Elba in April 1947, where the poet complains of a sweltering heat that “comes round corners like an animal with windmill arms” and makes his brains “hang out like a dog’s tongue”. His one salvation? Cold beer that is “bottled God”.

“It’s perfect for the stage,” says Usher. “Performers love to get their hands on Dylan Thomas’ letters because they’re so melodramatic.” Usher handpicked this one for the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire last year.

“I knew it was going to be hot, and it’s nice to use letters that speak to the occasion or surroundings,” he says. He asked British actor Ferdinand Kingsley to do the honours, praising the Mank movie star for being really good at accents.

Another standout is the letter by deaf-blind writer, educator and advocate Helen Keller, whose description of the recently opened Empire State Building makes it impossible not to contemplate her theory that the universe is all a dream where only the blind are awake. Keller wrote the letter in 1932 to Dr John H Finley, New York Times editor and president of the New York Association for the Blind, who said Keller often “beheld a brighter prospect than my friends with two good eyes”. Usher concurs: “She describes things so beautifully that even someone who can see would struggle to describe. It made me realise the things I don’t notice when I travel.”

Keller writes of “the hammer of Thor ring when the shaft began to rise upward”, “the sun and the stars” as “suburbs of New York” and sees through her mind “a romantic structure wrought by human brains and hands that is to the burning eye of the sun a rival luminary.”

“It feels like someone is speaking to you through the page,” says Usher. The letter was read by Golden Globe-winning actress Edie Falco (best known for playing Carmela Soprano and Nurse Jackie) at The Town Hall in New York City in 2018. Most of the time, letters are suggested for the live reading talent, explains Usher. Falco is American like Keller, he says, and her age was similar to Keller’s when she wrote the letter. “It ended up being perfect,” he concludes.

From Virginia Woolf to Elvis Presley

Just as powerful is the letter from celebrated author Vita Sackville-West to her lover, Virginia Woolf, famous for its opening line: “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.” Sackville-West wrote it while travelling by train from London to Persia in 1926. “You can imagine her on the train, her longing growing as she physically moves away from the person she loves so much,” says Usher, adding it’s rare to come across such vulnerable correspondence from woman to woman in this era. “You feel honoured to be reading it.”

Joanna Lumley read Sackville-West’s wistful words at a Letters Live event at Shoreditch Town Hall in London on Valentine’s Day in 2020. “Joanna Lumley is such a force of nature,” says Usher. “She’s a naturally amusing person, so we thought it would be nice to give her something against type, something more tender.”

The decision to cast writer-speaker opposites isn’t singular: it’s the reason quintessentially British comedy actor Matt Berry read Elvis Presley’s letter to President Nixon about becoming “a Federal Agent at Large” to fight drug crimes (as Mr Presley pointed out, he had “done an in-depth study of drug abuse”). So adamant was the King of Rock ’n’ Roll that he jetted off to the White House on 21 December 1970, wrote the letter mid-flight on five pages of airline stationery and hand-delivered it himself upon landing. For the live reading in 2022, Usher recalls Berry asking if he needed to put on an American accent. “I thought it would be quite funny,” confesses Usher. “But what would be even funnier? His own voice. It would make the whole thing even more ridiculous and surreal.”

Elvis’s mission didn’t work out. He left with a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs but no federal credentials. Berry’s performance, however, was a roaring success.

The next Letters Live event is on 28 November 2025 at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Enjoy a selection of Letters Live content on board British Airways long-haul flights