Will is going to be in conversation with Henry Eliot about Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater) and William S. Burroughs (Junky) in Soho for the new series of the podcast On the Road with Penguin Classics released on September 29. Listen to the trailer here.
The British Monarchy Should Die With the Queen
Read Will’s opinion piece on the monarchy at the Daily Beast.
Arvon Live Writing Day: Writing about place
Join Will for two Masterclasses delivered live and in-person at the Arvon Live Writing Day this Sunday from 9.30am at Hebden Bridge Town Hall. Will and Amy Liptrot will share some of their own methods of exploring an area – on foot, in words – and give you a chance to try them out. Do places have their own voices? Do they carry memories? How can we as writers tune into and translate them? You will consider what makes successful place writing as well as what makes you an individual.
There will be opportunities to be inspired by the landscape of Hebden Bridge and the Calder Valley as well as places from your own experience and imagination: town or city, island or forest, kitchen or carpark, map or cloud.
For more details and booking, visit the Arvon website.
On Damien Hirst
“Arguably, never in the decline and fall of the avant-garde had so few sold out for so much so quickly. From 1997, when the Royal Academy daringly mounted the Sensation exhibition, in less than five years, the likes of Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn et al., went from maybe scandalising to definitely cashing in: far more than the Britpop bands, it’s these lite – and often quite high – artists who personified the Blair era, with its serious comfort when it came to being seriously rich sugar-wrapped in social conscience.”
On Glastonbury
Will’s latest New European column takes aim at “that Kumbh Mela of the British bourgeoisie”.
Ports Fest evening
Will is going to be exploring the ways we remember the fiction we read in our youth, the role of memory, and our views of facticity at Ports Fest in Portsmouth on Thursday 30 June from 7.30pm till 9.20pm. He will also read from his latest book, Will: A Memoir. For tickets, go here.
Roughler Club, west London
Will is going to be performing as part of the line-up at the Roughler Club at the Playground Theatre, Latimer Road London W10 6RQ on Thursday June 2 from 7pm, a showcase for established and emerging artists of acoustic music, poetry and story telling. For more details and to buy tickets, visit the Playground Theatre website.
On the n-word
“Obviously, written words are received in a different context to spoken ones – but both allow for discursive explanation. If I teach Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, I give a trigger warning to students about the ten instances of the n-word in the text, but I also reserve the right – should we be discussing one of the relevant passages – to utter the word. In practice, I don’t think that has ever occurred (Huckleberry Finn might prove more problematic, since it’s bedizened with n-words), but the principle remains that to render any word unspeakable and un-writable, is to impose totalitarian double-think rather than advance the cause of racial justice.”
Reconsidering cannabis and the law
A Point of View on cannabis on Radio 4 can be heard here.
On the Kardashians
Will’s latest New European column has landed.
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