Will Self

Will Self
Will Self
Born	(1961-09-26) 26 September 1961 London, England
Occupation	Writer, Journalist
Website
www.will-self.com

William Self (born 26 September , 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.

Personal life

Will Self was raised, in his words, in "an effortlessly dull" North London suburb by "intellectually snobbish parents". Self's father was a professor in Political Sciences at the London School of Economics, and his mother, a Jewish-American emigre, and Self is Jewish, albeit not practising. Despite the intellectual encouragement given by his parents, Self was an emotionally confused and self-destructive child, harming himself with cigarette ends and knives before getting into drugs in his teenage years.

Despite the tempestuous background of his home life, Self was a voracious reader from a young age. At ten an interest into 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 illegal drugs grew analogous to his vehement reading. By nine he had a taste for alcohol, at thirteen he was smoking marijuana. By the time Self was eighteen his tastes had extended into the realm of heroin. However, Self still won a place at Exeter College, Oxford studying philosophy.

His reasons for not studying English, as one may assume, were covered by Self in an interview with the Guardian.

"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."

Self was addicted to heroin in the past, but has abstained from all drugs except coffee and tobacco since 1998.

Self was married to Katherine Sylvia Chancellor from 1989 to 1997. His former wife Katherine is a daughter of John Chancellor by his first wife Hon. Mary Joliffe (herself daughter of William Jolliffe, 4th Baron Hylton and a great-granddaughter of H.H. Asquith). She is also the sister of actress Anna Chancellor, and the niece of journalist Alexander Chancellor. They have a daughter called Madeline, and a son called Alexis.

In 1997 Self married Deborah Jane Orr, a journalist, with whom he has two sons called Ivan and Luther.

He currently lives in Vauxhall, South London, and has written about hikes he has taken around the city, of distances up to 100 miles. In December 2006, he walked 26 miles from his home in South London to Heathrow Airport. Upon arriving in the United States, he walked a further 20 miles from Kennedy Airport to the Crowne Plaza in Manhattan.

Career

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.

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.

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.

Works

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, that is discovered 500 years later and used as the sacred text for a religion that has taken hold in the flooded remnants of London.
• The Butt (Scheduled 2008)

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
• The Undivided Self: Selected Stories (short stories) Scheduled 2008

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)
• Perfidous Man (2000)
• Sore Sites (2000)
• Feeding Frenzy (2001)
• Psychogeography (2007)

Narration

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

Awards

• 1998: Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review for Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys
• 1991: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for "The Quantity Theory of Insanity"

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."

External links

• Official Will Self site
• Will Self at IMDb
• Template:Contemporary writers
• Guardian Books author page: Will Self
• Will Self article in Issue 08 of TATE ETC. magazine
• The Sweet Smell of Excess: Will Self, Bataille and Transgression (An essay examining Self's work and parallels with Georges Bataille.)
• A short interview: BBC
• Interview: Spike Magazine
• Audio Interview (available in Real Audio or mp3): Salon.com
• Self interviewed by the International Necronautical Society (see also INS)
• Transcript of Self's encounter with Richard Littlejohn interviewed on Radio Five Live by Nicky Campbell: BBC
• Will Self on why he writes
• "The Principle"