Epigram, Bristol University’s Independent Student Newspaper, has a splenetic interview with Will about why the forthcoming London Olympics “suck dogshit through a straw”.
Will Self: Interviews with Will
Will Self in The Best Of Spike Magazine
There are four vintage interviews with Will Self featured in the newly published Kindle ebook The Best Of SpikeMagazine.com – The Interviews, now available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
Ranging from 1997 to 2002, the four interviews cover Will’s novels Great Apes and How the Dead Live as well as the short story collection Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys and the journalism collection Feeding Frenzy. The interviews with Will feature alongside conversations with JG Ballard, Ralph Steadman, Douglas Coupland, Quentin Crisp, Julie Burchill, Catherine Camus (daughter of Albert Camus) and more.
On cycling
Will Self talks about cycling at a recent Intelligence Squared debate at the Royal Geographical Society, above, and at a Q&A with Geoff Dyer and others, below, where he defends going through red lights, and much more besides.
Cycling festival
The London Perambulator
The brilliant London Perambulator documentary about the “deep topographer” Nick Papadimitriou, and featuring contributions from Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Russell Brand, can now be seen in its entirety here.
Edinburgh festival interview
Ahead of Will Self’s appearances at the Edinburgh festival this weekend, here’s a preview from edinburgh-festivals.com:
“Will Self crosses Frith Street at a lope, a very tall man with a very small dog. Today, the writer, psychogeographer and urban wanderer has agreed to walk with me across London, from Bar Italia, at the throbbing heart of Soho, to the White Cube gallery, in the now-trendified East End. Maglorian, his Jack Russell, will accompany us.”
To read the rest of the interview, go here.
Paris Review interview
An interview with Will Self about Walking to Hollywood at the Paris Review here.
This Green and Pleasant Land
Watch Will Self tonight on BBC4 talking about the history of British landscape painting at 9pm.
Creative writing course? Get a job instead
“I’m still not convinced creative writing can be taught. Perhaps you can take a mediocre novelist and make them into a slightly better one, but a course can’t make someone into a good writer. Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguru both did the UEA MA, but they were both innately good anyway. Some people swear by creative-writing courses. I say, go and get a job, a fairly menial one, instead. Otherwise, what are you going to write about? Writing is about expressing something new and exploring the form in new ways. So unless you want to churn out thrillers or misery memoirs, you can’t work from a pattern book. You need to autodidact.”
The tweet smell of psychosis
Will Self asks “Is the internet inherently psychotic?” in this short interview recorded for insideopera.com.