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[[File:Will-self. | [[File:Will-self.webp|300px|thumb|right|Will Self]] | ||
=== Biography === | === Biography === | ||
Latest revision as of 10:55, 25 August 2026
Biography
William Woodard Self, born 26 September 1961 in London, English writer, journalist, political commentator, and broadcaster.[1] Educated at University College School, Christ's College Finchley, and Exeter College, Oxford.[1]
He has written eleven novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas, and nine collections of non-fiction.[1] His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.[2]
The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998) the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and The Butt (2008) the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.[2] Dorian, an Imitation (2002) was longlisted for the Booker Prize and Umbrella (2012) was shortlisted.[1]
He was appointed Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University London on 1 March 2012, in a chair created for him and spanning both the School of Arts and the School of Social Sciences, the university's first cross-school appointment between the two.[3] The courses attached to it covered urban planning and human geography, Reading for Writing, and Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Society.[3] He is now an honorary professor there.[1]
He writes for the Guardian, Harper's, the New York Times, the New Statesman, and the London Review of Books, and appears regularly on BBC television and Radio 4.[2]
Work
Psychogeography
Self wrote a regular psychogeography column for the Independent, collected as Psychogeography (Bloomsbury, 2007, 256 pages, illustrated by Ralph Steadman) and continued in Psycho Too (2009).[4]
The book opens with a walk from London to New York: on foot from his home in South London to Heathrow, a flight, then on foot from JFK into Manhattan.[4] The point of the exercise is to restore continuity to a journey that air travel presents as a discontinuous jump between two airports. Self describes his motivation as operating against the speed and pace of globalized travel, and casts himself as an insurgent against the contemporary world.[4]
He taught a psychogeography module at Brunel in two parts: an essay on the surrealists, situationists, and English Romantics, and a special project in which students undertake their own dérive and document it however they choose.[5] Self noted that most students recorded their dérives on phone cameras, and read the resulting handheld jitteriness as a fair account of the contemporary British built environment, one part excitement to several parts ennui.[5]
Fiction
Great Apes (1997), How the Dead Live (2000), Dorian, an Imitation (2002), The Book of Dave (2006), Walking to Hollywood (2010), Umbrella (2012), Shark (2014).[6] The fiction is satirical, grotesque, and fantastical, mostly set in London, and returns repeatedly to mental illness, drug use, and psychiatry.[1]
The Book of Dave is the most directly relevant to this wiki. A London cab driver's angry journal, buried and recovered five hundred years later, becomes the scripture of a post-flood society, complete with a liturgy derived from taxi driver's Knowledge and a religious calendar built around custody arrangements. The novel is written half in a reconstructed future dialect.
Umbrella concerns encephalitis lethargica survivors awakened by L-DOPA after decades of catatonia, and runs three time periods without chapter breaks.
Relevance
Self's psychogeography is a walking method for reading infrastructure. The London to New York walk works by refusing the abstraction that airports supply, and treating the airport as a place that has to be reached on foot rather than as a node one appears inside. That is a technique for making visible what a transport system is designed to conceal.
The Book of Dave also does something specific with information persistence. It takes an ephemeral private document, produced in a moment of rage and intended for one reader, and follows what happens when it survives its author, its context, and its language. The mechanism it describes is durability without interpretation, which is a live problem for any archive.
Self has been a consistent public critic of digital media's effect on reading and attention, including his 2014 Guardian essay declaring the serious literary novel finished as a cultural form.
Further Reading
- Theory of the Derive
- Wanderlust
- The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
- Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
- The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
- The Image of the City
- The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society
- The Poetics of Space
- In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture
- Place: The Networking of Public Space
- Society of the Spectacle
- The A to Z of Postmodern Life: Essays on Global Culture in the Noughties
- Present Shock
- The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century
External Links
- will-self.com
- Will Self, Wikipedia
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Will Self, Wikipedia.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Interview with Will Self, ResearchGate.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Will Self joins Brunel University as Professor of Contemporary Thought, Brunel University.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Psychogeography (book), Wikipedia.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 How do you teach psychogeography?, New Statesman, 2016.
- ↑ Will Self, The Modern Novel.
