It’s National Book Lovers Day so we’ve gone looking for the hotels with genuine literary pedigree. Not where an author once had a drink, but where they checked in, sat down and wrote the books we still read today.

Plenty of hotels claim a passing brush with greatness. Far rarer — and far more romantic — are the ones where a famous book was truly written, room-service trays pushed aside for the manuscript. Here are the addresses where literary history was actually made, and where you can still book the very rooms.

The Balmoral, Edinburgh
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — J.K. Rowling

In January 2007, holed up in room 552 to escape the distractions of home, J.K. Rowling wrote the final words of the entire Harry Potter saga. She marked the moment by signing a marble bust in the room — and the suite is now named in her honour, complete with a brass owl door knocker. The most fitting pilgrimage in Britain for any book lover.

GoldenEye, Jamaica
The James Bond novels — Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming built this modest villa on Jamaica’s north coast in 1946 and returned every winter to write. Across those visits he produced all fourteen James Bond books — from Casino Royale to Dr. No and From Russia, with Love — at his desk overlooking the sea. Today GoldenEye is a chic boutique resort where you can sleep in Fleming’s own rooms.

Hotel Ambos Mundos, Havana
For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway kept room 511 at this rose-pink hotel in Old Havana through the 1930s, and it’s where he worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls. The room is preserved much as he left it — typewriter, bed and all — as a small museum to the writer’s Cuban years.

Fairmont Le Montreux Palace, Switzerland
Ada, and the late works — Vladimir Nabokov

The author of Lolita spent the last 16 years of his life living permanently in this grand lakeside hotel on Lake Geneva, writing Ada and much of his later work from his sixth-floor rooms. A statue of Nabokov still sits in the grounds, gazing out at the water that kept him there.

The Hotel Chelsea, New York
2001: A Space Odyssey — Arthur C. Clarke

New York’s most gloriously bohemian address has sheltered more writers than almost anywhere on earth. It was here that Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, while Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe and a century of poets and novelists worked, caroused and occasionally unravelled within its red-brick walls.

Pera Palace Hotel, Istanbul
Murder on the Orient Express — Agatha Christie

Built in 1892 to receive passengers stepping off the Orient Express, the Pera Palace is where Agatha Christie is said to have written her most famous mystery. Room 411, which she is believed to have favoured, is now dedicated to her – a fittingly enigmatic shrine for the Queen of Crime.

Raffles Singapore
The Far Eastern short stories — W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham wrote many of his celebrated tropical tales seated in Raffles’ Palm Court garden, gathering the gossip and scandal of colonial society that filled them. He called the hotel a symbol “of all the fables of the exotic East”  and the Writers Bar still toasts him, alongside Kipling and Conrad, to this day.

Sofitel Legend Metropole, Hanoi
The Quiet American — Graham Greene

Graham Greene checked into this grand French-colonial hotel in the early 1950s, and the Hanoi he found there poured directly into The Quiet American. Somerset Maugham wrote here too – proof that a good hotel bar and a war correspondent’s nose for a story make excellent literary company.

A note on “written” versus “inspired”: some legendary literary hotels earned their fame differently. Stephen King spent a single, spooky night at Colorado’s Stanley Hotel and left with the idea for The Shining – but wrote the book elsewhere. The hotels above are the rarer breed: the ones where the actual writing was done.