Will Self is going to conduct a live video chat with the LA Times today at 10am Pacific (6pm GMT) about his new novel, Umbrella, and many other things besides.
Watch again here.
Will Self is going to conduct a live video chat with the LA Times today at 10am Pacific (6pm GMT) about his new novel, Umbrella, and many other things besides.
Watch again here.
Will is going to be on the Question Time panel in Bristol this Thursday on BBC1 at 10.35pm with Justine Greening MP, secretary of state for international development, Stella Creasy MP, shadow home office minister, Lord Bilimoria, founder of Cobra Beer; and Peter Hitchens.
Concluding its series on modernism, the Southbank Centre in London is holding an event on Monday 3 December discussing modernist writing and thinking in modern culture. Will Self will chair a panel of writers and critics including Owen Hatherley, the author of Militant Modernism and A New Kind of Bleak. For further details and to book tickets, go here.
You can read Will’s reviews of Militant Modernism and A New Kind of Bleak at the LRB here.
Following on from Will Self’s recent “digital essay” on Kafka, he’s going to be talking about “Kafka and Dissonant Bohemia” as part of the Kings Place Notes & Letters festival in London on Sunday October 7 at 2pm. To buy tickets (£9.50) and for more details, go here.
You can read a version of Will’s talk here at the Guardian.
(Also look out for interviews with Will on the Today programme, in Time Out, the Spectator, and on the Robert Elms Show. More to follow.)
August 24: 4pm, Happy Days, Belmore Street, Enniskillen, Will Self in Conversation.
August 25: 9.30pm, Edinburgh book festival, In discussion with Stuart Kelly.
August 26: 8.30pm, Edinburgh book festival, in discussion with “deep topographer” and author of Scarp, Nick Papadimitriou.
September 6: 7pm, Will Self on the digital essay, LRB bookshop event, 14 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL.
September 13: South Bank, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Will Self launches his new novel, Umbrella, in the first of a series of events curated by him exploring the legacy and provocation of modernism upon writing today.
September 15: An audience with Will Self, St Georges Theatre in Great Yarmouth.
September 19: 6.30pm, The Idler Academy, St Stephen’s Church, Westbourne Park Road, London W2 5QT. Will Self returns to the Idler Academy to read from his new novel, chat and answer your questions. This is a special chance to meet him properly in an intimate setting over a drink and ask him to sign your book.
September 21: 6pm, Main Hall, BHASVIC, 205 Dyke Road, Hove, BN3 6EG, £8, tickets available from City Books, 23 Western Road, Hove, email info@city-books.co.uk.
September 25: 7.30pm, Clapham Bookshop, free, no need to book.
September 27: Wreford Watson lecture, Edinburgh.
September 29: Midday, South Bank, modernism lecture with Gabriel Josipovici – Will Self chairing. 2pm: South Bank, modernism lecture – Jonathan Coe on BS Johnson – Will Self chairing.
October 4: Intelligence Squared Bloomsbury Book Club with Will Self. Come and discuss Will Self’s most ambitious novel to date with Will and his editor at the offices of Bloomsbury Publishing in Bedford Square.
October 7: 2pm, Hall One, Kings Place, London, Will Self: Kafka and Dissonant Bohemia.
October 7: 7.45pm, Cambridge Arts Theatre.
October 11: 7pm, An evening with Will Self, Oxford Waterstones, 01865 790212.
October 14: 7.30pm, Close Up with Will Self, Manchester Royal Exchange.
October 15: 7.30pm, Royal Festival Hall, Man Booker shortlist event. Note, this event will also be shown live at the Picturehouse chain of cinemas. More details here.
October 16: London Transport Museum, “Join broadcaster Robert Elms, Will Self and artist Stephen Walter as they discuss what lies beneath London. Explore forgotten sewers, lost graveyards and hidden rivers … and maybe some of London’s sunken treasures.” NB This event will now be on November 19.
October 17: 7pm, Hull, Ideas Allowed, Orchard Park Centre.
October 22: 7pm, Brunel university, Newton Room, Hamilton Centre, Modernism: an evening of debate with Will Self and John Carey.
October 23: 8pm, Inside Out Festival, Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s College London
October 24: 8pm, Bath, Topping & Company Booksellers.
October 25: 6pm-7pm, Bristol, Arnolfini.
October 29: 7.30pm, Chester Literary Festival.
November 1: Waterstones, Hampstead.
November 7: 7.30pm, free, at the Literary Leicester Festival.
November 12: 7pm, Brunel university, Newton Room, Hamilton Centre, Modernism: an evening of debate with Will Self and Iain Sinclair.
November 14: Friern Barnet library, 7pm, details here.
November 19: London Transport Museum. ”Join broadcaster Robert Elms, Will Self and artist Stephen Walter as they discuss what lies beneath London. Explore forgotten sewers, lost graveyards and hidden rivers … and maybe some of London’s sunken treasures.”
November 22: Longford lecture, Assembly Hall of Church House, Westminster SW1P 3NZ. Mind Bending Behind Bars: Drug Use in British Prisons.
There are still some tickets left for next Wednesday’s London Film Society Live evening at the Museum of London, Weston Theatre, 150 London Wall, London, EC2Y 5HN with Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Julien Temple, discussing cinema and London.
The evening will be illustrated by clips from a variety of films, new and old, that show London on the big screen, from My Beautiful Laundrette and The Lavender Hill Mob to Performance and Naked. There will also be clips from two new films: Julien Temple’s London – The Modern Babylon and Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair’s Swandown.
For further details and to book tickets go to the Time Out website here.
Join Will Self, Saskia Sassen, Anna Minton and Stephen Gill at the Southbank Centre Purcell Room on Thursday 5 July at 7.45pm, to hear a discussion about Olympic regeneration and planning in east London. For details, go here.
June 15: As part of the UCL Festival of London and Literature’s One Day in the City, Will Self is going to be talking about nightwalking with William Raban, Matthew Beaumont (who co-edited the excellent Restless Cities) and Ger Duijzings from 2pm to 3pm at the Darwin lecture theatre. There will be a showing of William Raban’s short film The Houseless Shadow before the discussion. Entry is free.
June 19: Will is going to be in conversation with Mike Shamash reflecting on how writing about disability has changed and the potential for a new paradigm at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre from 2pm to 6pm. Details here.
Will Self is blogging here about a digital essay he’s writing, Kafka’s Wound, commissioned by the London Review of Books, which will be launched on The Space website.
His essay will examine his personal relationship to Kafka’s work through the lens of the short story “A Country Doctor” (1919), and in particular through the aperture of the wound described in that story.
The essay is being “through composed” with Will’s own thoughts, as he works, being responded to by digital-content providers – many of whom are colleagues of his at Brunel University. The entire digital essay will go live in July.
There’s also a news story about the wider project at the Guardian here.
Also, tomorrow at City University in London from 5pm to 7pm, Will is going to be part of a panel discussing the difficulties inherent in translation, with particular reference to the aforementioned Kafka story. For more details go here.
Will Self is going to be discussing the poet Ros Barber’s new verse novel The Marlowe Papers at the British Library tonight at 6.30pm with Barber and the Shakespearean scholar Bill Leahy.
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