Will Self
Will Self was born on 26 September 1961 at Charing Cross Hospital in London, a city that has remained a recurring presence throughout his life and work. A British citizen writing in English, he was educated at Christ's College, Finchley before going on to Exeter College. From those beginnings in the English capital, he built a career that spans fiction, journalism, and essay writing across several decades.
Self has worked as a novelist, science fiction writer, journalist, and essayist, producing a substantial body of work that includes 11 novels, three novellas, five collections of shorter fiction, and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Among his novels are The Book of Dave and Umbrella, two works that demonstrate the range of his output in long-form fiction. His interests include psychogeography, a preoccupation with the relationship between people and the spaces they move through, which surfaces across different areas of his writing.
His work has been recognised with several awards. He received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, two British literary honours, as well as the Tähtivaeltaja Award, a Finnish prize associated with science fiction. The breadth of these awards reflects the variety of forms and genres he has worked across during his career.
Self currently holds the position of honorary Professor at Brunel University London. Born in the city that has shaped much of his writing life, he has produced work across an unusually wide range of forms — from novels and novellas to shorter fiction and non-fiction collections. That output, taken alongside his journalism and his academic role, gives a sense of how consistently he has moved between different modes of writing throughout his career.
Quotes by Will Self
Will Self's insights on:
When anyone starts out to do something creative – especially if it seems a little unusual – they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on.
Mother sighed with exasperation. “Look, there aren’t any “people in charge of death”. When you die you move to another part of London, that’s all there is to it. Period.
Grove Health Center,” trilled the woman on the end of the line. She had the vocal automisation that comes to people whose job description might as well read: ‘Ceaseless repetition’.
He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in a wash of low wattage, Their dimness gave the lie to the very vastless of the city. Bull heard its distant roar, its night-time sough, its terminal cough.
There’s a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.
Dan slept throughout – but a man who sleeps with his head lying on a phone table can never really sleep with a clean conscience.
The life of the professional writer – like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist – is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn’t be any remuneration, period.
I’m an anarchist. I’m implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence – gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim ‘You know exactly what I mean!’ depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.