https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/21/how-does-a-young-writer-pay-the-rent-affordable-education-coronavirus-pandemic

Affordable education and a buoyant economy help – but being a vagabond artist is still precarious. Could the Covid-19 pandemic create a moment of opportunity for writing?

There is a fact about me I’ve been known to trot out in smart company for the purposes of gaining the upper hand: I won a place at Oxford to do my DPhil and couldn’t go because you needed to have £30,000 in your bank account before they let you in. I didn’t have it and my family didn’t have it and that was that.

I went to King’s College London instead, had a splendid time, won a scholarship that let me quit my job and lived in wilful penury so I could succeed. Not regretting this for a moment, I turned to the job market but found myself working as a clerk for minimum wage because there was not, it seemed, an academic job to be had, and if I wanted to climb the ladder I needed to build on my PhD by doing casual teaching, editing, conference hosting, publishing and other things I couldn’t do with a 40-hour week and no money. My peers with “generous” (or, as we say around here, rich) parents could, but it looked as if I was facing into a future of seven-tenant house-shares and frontier antidepressants.