Will Self

Nicholas Wroe interviews Will Self in the wake of How The Dead Live’s publication:

“Looking back, Self thinks that getting his first book accepted was the high point of his literary career. “By this time I had children to support, but more than that, at a personal level, it was enormously liberating knowing I could do this thing. Whether out of anxiety or productivity, I just didn’t want to stop doing it.”

In the decade since he has produced four novels, another two collections of stories, a pair of linked novellas, a book of collected non-fiction and, last year, a meditation on masculinity that focused on the case history of a transsexual. His most recent novel, How the Dead Live , is published in paperback this month. It echoes one of his earliest and best short stories, “The North London Book of the Dead”, in which a young man has the unsettling experience of meeting his recently deceased mother in Crouch End.

“I was very interested in writing about this idea of what it was like for materialistic, atheistic people to die with no sense of spiritual transcendence,” he explains. “I’d seen my mother and, to a degree, my father, die like that, and it had a profound effect on me. In order to write a book that would do justice to the subject, I realised that my own lifestyle, which at that point was completely mired in active addiction, would have to change. So in a sense the book became something of a vehicle of recovery, and possibly even redemption, for me.” ”

Read the full interview online

To celebrate the paperback release of How the Dead Live, Will Self’s inventive, savage meditation on life after death, Penguin have rejacketed several of Will’s books with stunning new artwork from some of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists.

In an exclusive interview, we asked Will his thoughts on everything from drug addiction and Jewishness to the disintegration of the soul.

You’re involved with many things; journalism, short-stories, novels. Do you regard these as being quite different activities?

I’ve always thought of myself as a writer first and foremost, the whole business of my work is to mediate the world through language, whatever form that language takes. However, that being said, my heart lies in a particular kind of fiction, fiction of the alternative world. The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

You display an interest in science fiction, and in the writing of JG Ballard. Was this your childhood reading?

As a child I absolutely gorged myself on sci-fi, I’d eat it in great truckles and sort of chewed it up, I could not get my hands on enough of the stuff. There are certain writers who are kind of science fiction, but something more, like J G Ballard, arguably even somebody like Robert Heinlein and Philip K Dick. I ate these along with the whole mush and brew.

Read the full interview on the Penguin website