Will Self’s memoir, Will, is published today by Viking. Duncan White in The Daily Telegraph said: “Self writes with the same propulsive prose that he has deployed in his masterful recent trilogy, Umbrella (2012), Shark (2014) and Phone (2017), replete with riffs, puns, recursive loops and characteristic ellipses and italics. Perhaps Will is just another Selfian character, subject to absolute authorial control, the fragmented derangement of his youth woven into an intricate and coherent whole by the mature author.”
In conversation with Iggy Pop
Will Self in Conversation
From April 2019, talking about Umbrella, Shark and Phone and the writing process.
Will Self events, winter 2019
Hillingdon Literary Festival talk
Will Self’s talk from October 2018 at the Hillingdon Literary Festival, which begins with a reading from a section of his short story “Scale” (from Grey Area). Will discusses the writing of his books Walking to Hollywood and Phone, the importance of the M40 in his fiction, pretending to be British, the Iraq war and a little about his new memoir, Will, which is due to be published in November.
Protecting Digital Privacy lecture at Brunel University
WowFest19 keynote speech
This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis
Will features quite heavily in this rather good 1999 documentary about Bret Easton Ellis.
A liberal interpretation
‘Not a day goes by without further frontline despatches from the war between our established liberal ideology and the strange new realities that body-forth from the future. Taking today — the one on which I sat down to write this article — as representative, I found in my morning bulletins a report about how the US Constitution’s vaunted separation of powers — personified by Special Counsel Robert Mueller — was leading inexorably to the indictment, and hence removal, of “rogue” President Donald Trump. Then there was an item about the minister for women, whose public musings about the rise in the numbers of young people applying for gender-reassignment therapies were being taken as prima facie evidence that she doubted the authenticity of trans people’s claims to be gender dysphoric.
A Point of View: Parity of Esteem
You can listen to Will’s recent Point of View on Radio 4 here, in which he talks about the disturbing story of what happened to a friend, recently detained in a London psychiatric hospital.
