Will Self

Will Self
Born	William Woodard Self (1961-09-26) 26 September 1961 North London, United Kingdom
Occupation	Novelist, journalist
Nationality	English
Citizenship	British
Education	Bachelor of Arts
Alma mater	Exeter College, Oxford
Period	1991 – present
Genres	Satire
Notable work(s)	Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, The Book of Dave Umbrella
Notable award(s)	Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction 1998 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2008
Spouse(s)	Kate Chancellor (1989–1997) Deborah Orr (1997–present)
Relative(s)	Peter Self (father) Jonathan Self (brother)
Influences J. G. Ballard, Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, Franz Kafka
www.will-self.com

William Woodard "Will" Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English author, journalist and television personality.

Self is the author of nine novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and five collections of non-fiction writing. His work has been translated into 22 languages, and his novel Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His fiction is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical, and is predominantly set within London. His subject matter often includes mental illness, illegal drugs and psychiatry.

Self is a regular contributor to publications including Playboy, Harpers, The New York Times and the London Review of Books. He currently writes two fortnightly columns for New Statesman, and over the years he has been a columnist for The Observer, The Times and the Evening Standard. His columns for Building Design on the built environment, and for the Independent Magazine on the psychology of place brought him to prominence as a thinker concerned with the politics of urbanity.

Self is a regular contributor on British television, initially as a guest on comic panel shows such as Have I Got News For You and Shooting Stars, but latterly appearing on serious political programmes such as Newsnight and Question Time. He is also a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4.

Early life

Self was born and raised in North London, between the suburbs of East Finchley and Hampstead Garden Suburb. His parents were Peter Self, Professor of Public Administration at the London School of Economics, and Elaine Self (née Rosenbloom), an American from Queens, New York, who worked as a publisher's assistant. His father was from an Anglican family and his mother was Jewish. His paternal grandfather, with working class origins in Fulham, was a high-ranking civil servant and Chairman of the Lay Association of the Church of England, who ended his career as Chairman of the Electricity Board. Self is a paternal descendant of minister Nathaniel Woodard, hence his middle name. As a child, Self spent a year living in Ithaca, Upstate New York.

Self's parents separated when he was nine, and divorced when he was eighteen. Despite the intellectual encouragement given by his parents, he was an emotionally confused and self-destructive child, harming himself with cigarette ends and knives before getting into drugs.

Self was a voracious reader from a young age. At ten an interest in science fiction grew, with notable works such as Frank Herbert's Dune, J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick reflecting the precociousness of Self's reading. Into his teenage years, Self claimed to have been "overawed by the canon", stifling his ability to express himself. Nevertheless, Self's dabbling with drugs grew in step with his prolific reading. Self started smoking marijuana at the age of twelve, graduating through amphetamines, cocaine, and acid to heroin, which he started injecting at eighteen.

Self attended University College School, an independent school for boys in Hampstead in North London. He later attended Christ's College, Finchley, from where he went to Exeter College at Oxford University, reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating with a third class degree. His reasons for reading PPE rather than English literature were discussed by Self in an interview with The Guardian newspaper:

I [had] a pretty thorough grounding in the canon, but I certainly didn't want to be involved with criticism. Even then it seemed inimical to what it was to be a writer, which is what I really wanted to be.

Of Self's background Nick Rennison has written that he:

is sometimes presented as a bad-boy outsider, writing, like the Americans William S Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr, about sex, drugs and violence in a very direct way. Yet he is not some class warrior storming the citadels of the literary establishment from the outside, but an Oxford educated, middle-class metropolitan who, despite his protestations to the contrary in interviews, is about as much at the heart of the establishment as you can get, a place he has occupied almost from the start of his career.

Career

Self at a 2002 book signing

After graduating from Oxford, Self worked for the Greater London Council, including a period as a road sweeper, whilst living in Brixton. He then pursued a career as a cartoonist for the New Statesman and other publications and as a stand-up comedian. He moved to the Gloucester Road, London area around 1985. In 1986 he entered a treatment centre in Weston-super-Mare, where he claims that his heroin addiction was cured. He then "through a series of accidents" ended up running a small publishing company.

The publication of his short story collection The Quantity Theory of Insanity brought him to public attention in 1991. Self was hailed as an original new talent by Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Beryl Bainbridge, A. S. Byatt, and Bill Buford. In 1993 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 "Best Young British Novelists". Conversely, Self's second book, My Idea of Fun, was "mauled" by the critics.

He gained some notoriety in 1997 when he was sent by the broadsheet The Observer to cover the election campaign of John Major and was caught by a rival journalist using heroin on the Prime Minister's jet, and was fired as a result. At the time, he argued "I'm a hack who gets hired because I do drugs". Suzanne Moore commented:

If Will Self were a "proper" journalist he would have downed a bottle of Scotch, nodded off, and garnered his quotes from the Media Party machinery just like everyone else. His innocence is rather touching. Maybe he even thought there might be a real story and something might happen. And now there is and it is him.

Self has stated that he has abstained from drugs, except for caffeine and nicotine, since 1998.

He has made many appearances on British television, especially as a panellist on Have I Got News for You and as a regular on Shooting Stars. Since 2008 Self has appeared five times on Question Time. Since 2007, Self has later stopped appearing in Have I Got News for You, stating the show has become a pseudo-panel show.

Since 2009 Self has written two alternating fortnightly columns for the New Statesman. The Madness of Crowds explores social phenomena and group behaviour, and in Real Meals he reviews high street food outlets.

In 2012, Self was appointed Professor of Contemporary Thought at Brunel University. In July 2012, Self received his first Man Booker Prize longlist nomination for Umbrella, which The Daily Telegraph described as "possibly Self's most ambitious novel to date". The book was later placed on the prize shortlist.

Literary style

According to M. Hunter Hayes, Self has given his reason for writing as follows: "I don't write fiction for people to identify with and I don't write a picture of the world they can recognise. I write to astonish people." "What excites me is to disturb the reader's fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable."

The influences on his fiction mentioned most frequently include J. G. Ballard whom he considers "a great mentor", William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. He has cited^{[citation needed]} influences such as Jonathan Swift, Alasdair Gray, Franz Kafka, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Heller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline as formative influences on his writing style.

Zack Busner is a recurring character in the fiction of Will Self, appearing in the short story collections The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Grey Area, Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, as well as in the novels Great Apes, The Book of Dave and Umbrella. Busner is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practising in London, and is prone to self-promotion at the expense of his patients. He is often the antagonist of the stories he appears in, although not always with villainous intent.

Among his admirers is the American critic Harold Bloom.

Personal life

Self's mother died in 1988. He was married from 1989 to 1997 to Kate Chancellor. They have two children, a son Alexis and a daughter Madeleine. They lived together in a terraced house just off the Portobello Road. In 1997, Self married journalist Deborah Orr, with whom he has sons Ivan and Luther. His brother is the author and journalist Jonathan Self. He lives in Stockwell, South London.

He has described himself as a Psychogeographer and modern flâneur and has written about walks he has taken. In December 2006, he walked 26 miles from his home in South London to Heathrow Airport. Upon arriving at Kennedy Airport he walked 20 miles from there to Manhattan.

Self is 6' 5" tall, collects and repairs vintage typewriters and smokes a pipe; he claims that a psychologist once described him as schizoid personality and borderline personality.

Awards

• 1991: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Quantity Theory of Insanity
• 1998: Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review for Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys
• 2008: Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction for "The Butt"
• Self has been shortlisted three times for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award: in 2002 for Dorian, in 2004 for "Dr Mukti" in Dr Mukti and other tales of woe and in 2006 for The Book of Dave.

Bibliography

Fiction

• Cock and Bull (1992)
• My Idea of Fun (1993)
• Great Apes (1997)
• How the Dead Live (2000)
• Dorian, an Imitation (2002)
• The Book of Dave (2006)
• The Butt (2008)
• Walking to Hollywood (2010)
• Umbrella (2012)

Short fiction

• The Quantity Theory of Insanity (short stories) 1991
• Grey Area (short stories) 1994
• License to Hug, a James Bond story published in Esquire magazine, November 1995
• The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (illustrated novella) 1996
• Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo (short stories) 1998
• Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (short stories) 1998
• Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (short stories) 2004
• Liver: A Fictional Organ with a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes (short stories) 2008
• The Undivided Self: Selected Stories (short stories) 2010

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)
• Perfidious Man (2000) photography by David M. Gamble
• Sore Sites (2000)
• Feeding Frenzy (2001)
• Psychogeography (2007)
• Psycho Too (2009)
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker (2012)

Scheduled

• Entirely Women TBA

Introductions and forewords

• The Book of Revelation (1998)
• Blue of Noon by Georges Bataille (2000)
• Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (2002)
• Junky by William S. Burroughs (2002)
• Genius: The Best of Warren Zevon (CD liner notes, 2002)
• Before the Poison by Marianne Faithfull (CD liner notes, 2004)
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (2007)
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (2010)
• The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller (2010)
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (Visual Editions, 2010)
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (2010)
• Little People in the City: The street art of Slinkachu by Slinkachu (2008)

Narration

• Narration on "5ml. Barrel" from the album Clear (1995) by Bomb the Bass

• Narration on "The Happy Detective" from the compilation album series Late Night Tales, by The Cinematic Orchestra, Groove Armada, Midlake and Snow Patrol

Television

• The Minor Character — Self's short story was turned into a short film on Sky Arts which starred David Tennant as “Will”.

Radio

• In Defence of Obscure Words

External links

• Official Will Self site
• Will Self at the Internet Movie Database
• Will Self at Contemporary Writers
• Will Self on why he writes
• "The Principle", short fiction by Will Self
• Will Self Profile from the New Statesman
• Guardian Books author page: Will Self
• A short interview: BBC
• Salon interview (audio)