“In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty paper that surround it. [...] If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he’ll be suffering from a hangover.”

- George Orwell, Confessions of a Book Reviewer

That must be the image most people have when they think of the proverbial writers. And why not? People who sit on their asses hours and hours a day and imagine things they will never ever experience in their life and write these down will need an outlet, so no wonder many writers took to the bottle as their very own way of escapism.

Here’s a list of my favourite literary dead drunks – not that I’m advertising this lifestyle, but cannot hide a little bit of awe considering the way these guys drank themself to oblivion and death with determination.

Joseph Roth

A Jewish journalist born in Austria-Hungary, who moved from there to Berlin and then on to Paris in the 1930’s, where he drank himself to death. His prose drips with old-worldliness and he was a hell of an observer of people and politics of the time. Also wrote “The legend of the holy drinker”.

“A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.”

Dylan Thomas

Welsh poet and playwright, whose masterpiece, the play “Under Milk Wood” was filmed with fellow alcoholic and Welshman Richard Burton. Also wrote some of my favourite English-language poems, “Don’t go gentle into that good night” and “And death shall have no dominion”. Died of alcohol poisoning in New York, aged 39.

“Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.”

Brendan Behan

The proverbial Irish drunk writer. Wrote short stories, plays, poems and books, he destroyed himself so thouroughly with drink that he had to dictate his last books because he could no longer write.

“It’s not that the Irish are cynical. It’s rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.”.

Charles Bukowski

I’ve sung the praise of Buk multipe times before, but here it is again: short and strong prose born out of cheap beer cans, poignant and hurting poems fuelled by cheap wine, I wonder how he managed his output unhampered by the gazillion hangovers he endured. Lived to the age of 73, surprisingly.

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”