Will Self

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Will Self
Will Self

William Self (born September 26, 1961) is an English novelist, reviewer and columnist. He received his education at University College School, Christ's College Finchley, and Exeter College, Oxford. He is married to journalist Deborah Orr.

Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.

Contents

[edit] Life

Highly articulate, Will Self has made several appearances on British television, notably as a contestant on Have I Got News for You (to date he has made eight guest appearances, a record jointly held with Germaine Greer) and as a regular on Shooting Stars and Grumpy Old Men as well as an appearance on Room 101. He gained a degree of infamy in 1997 when he was sent by the British broadsheet The Observer to cover the electoral campaign of John Major, and was subsequently fired from the newspaper after taking heroin on the Prime Minister's jet.[1]

His Psychogeography column appears in the magazine section of the Saturday edition of The Independent. He has also written for the New Statesman and Prospect magazine.

[edit] Literary style

Like Salman Rushdie, Will Self loads his fiction with references and allusions to modern culture (both high and low) and like Rushdie he is probably the only person able to recognise them all. The influences on his fiction mentioned most frequently include J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson often not for purely literary reasons. Alongside these he has cited such diverse writers as Jonathan Swift, Alasdair Gray, Franz Kafka, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Heller and Louis-Ferdinand Celine as formative influences on his writing style. Martin Amis is often mentioned alongside Self; Self went to interview him but they ended up having more of a discussion about each other's work and lives — it is known that they have tremendous respect for each other.

[edit] Works

[edit] Fiction

  • Cock and Bull (1992) — the stories of a man and a woman who develop sexual organs of the opposite sex.
  • My Idea of Fun (1993) — a lonely boy grows up just outside Brighton in a caravan park with his over-sexual mother and Samuel Northcliff who takes the boy on a disturbing and often violent journey.
  • Great Apes (1997) — a man wakes up in a world where chimpanzees evolved to be the species with self-awareness, while humans are the equivalent of chimps in our world.
  • How the Dead Live (2000) — an old lady dies, only to be moved to a London suburb where the dead have taken residence.
  • Dorian, an Imitation (2002) — a modern take on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
  • The Book of Dave (2006) — Set in 2003, against a backdrop of Fathers for Justice protests, it is the story of a London cab driver who suffers a mental breakdown due to failed relationships, estrangement from his son and an obsession with The Knowledge. He writes a book of rantings which he buries, which is discovered 500 years later and used as the sacred text for a religion that has taken hold in the flooded remnants of London.

[edit] Short Fiction

  • The Quantity Theory of Insanity (Short Stories) 1991
  • Grey Area (Short Stories) 1994
  • The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (Illustrated Novella) 1996
  • Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Short Stories) 1998
  • Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (Short Stories) 2004

[edit] Non-Fiction

Self has also compiled several books of work from his newspaper and magazine columns which mix interviews with counter-culture figures, restaurant reviews and literary criticism.

  • Junk Mail (1996)
  • Sore Sites (2000)
  • Feeding Frenzy (2001)

[edit] Narration

"5ml. Barrel" Bomb the Bass album Clear.

[edit] Awards

[edit] Quotes

"All my work is highly personal; it's more personal than me. You know, reading my books is having a far more intimate relationship with me than having a relationship with me."

"I want to be misunderstood. And the other thing that amuses me is: I don't particularly want to be liked. Nobody goes into the business of writing satire to be liked. Whether I am or am not a nice bloke is neither here nor there. It's not part of the task I've set myself in my art."

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wroe, Nicholas. "Addicted to transmogrification", The Guardian, 2001-06-02. Retrieved on February 9, 2007.

[edit] External links

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