Both general readers and specialist critics often complain about my own use of English – not only in my books, but also in my newspaper articles and even in radio talks such as these. “I have to look them up in a dictionary”, they complain – as if this were some kind of torture.
Follow the link for the full transcript of Will Self on A Point Of View: In Defense Of Obscure Words. You can also listen to the radio broadcast through the BBC iPlayer.
Will Self describes the importance of J.G. Ballard’s writing in this 7 minute video from The Literature Society’s ‘Alternative Good Friday Sermon Event’.
A 20 minute video of Will Self reading an excerpt from his forthcoming novel “Umbrella” at The Literature Society’s ‘Alternative Good Friday Sermon Event’.
Metro newspaper has an interview with Will that covers his thoughts on politicians, appearing on Question Time, and why he’s just “a regular family guy”.
Will on a disturbing dream about the current British Prime Minister for the FT magazine.
“A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.” James Joyce, Ulysses
Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community – the so-called Concept House in Willesden – maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades.
Fun interview between Will Self and David Tennant in the Evening Standard about Will’s short story The Minor Character, which has been turned into a short film on Sky Arts, and which stars David Tennant as “Will”, 12 April, 9pm on Sky Arts 1 (sky.com/arts).
I consider chicken again – and gladly! At night, in sweat-basted sleep, I slip and slide over chicken-skin terrain, popping juice-engorged blisters with my toecaps. By day I wonder if I should try out the new takeaway that’s opened down the road, the name of which – Chicken Valley – appeals to my sense of south London’s fowl topography: a vale of chickens, what might that be like?
To watch Will Self debating George Galloway’s byelection win in Bradford West on Newsnight last night, go here.
The Guardian has published an edited version of Will Self’s inaugural lecture as professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University, which can be read here or in Guardian Review tomorrow.