William Woodard Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English writer, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster.[3][4][5] He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Self is currently Professor ofModern Thought at Brunel University London, where he teaches psychogeography.[6]
His 2002 novel Dorian, an Imitation was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and his 2012 novel Umbrella was shortlisted.[7] His fiction is known for being satirical, grotesque and fantastical, and is predominantly set within his home city of London. His writing often explores mental illness, drug abuse and psychiatry.
Self is a regular contributor to British television, initially as a guest on comic panel shows such as Have I Got News for You. In 2002, Self replaced Mark Lamarr on the BBC comedy panel show Shooting Stars[8][9] for two series, but was himself replaced by comedian Jack Dee when the programme returned in 2008.[9] He has since appeared on current affairs programmes such as Newsnight and Question Time. Self is a contributor to the BBC Radio 4 programme A Point of View,[10] to which he contributes radio essays delivered in his familiar "lugubrious tones".[11] In 2013, Self took part in discussions about becoming the inaugural BBC Radio 4 Writer-in-Residence,[11] but later withdrew.[12]
Self's parents separated when he was nine, and divorced when he was 18.[18] Despite the intellectual encouragement given by his parents, he was an emotionally confused and self-destructive child, harming himself with cigarette ends and knives before beginning to experiment with drugs.[19]
Self was a voracious reader from a young age. When he was 10, he developed an interest in works of science fiction such as Frank Herbert's Dune and the works of J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick.[20][21] Into his teenage years, Self claimed to have been "overawed by the canon", which stifled his ability to express himself. Self's use of drugs increased in step with his prolific reading. He started smoking cannabis at the age of 12, progressing by way of amphetamines, cocaine and LSD to heroin, which he started injecting at 18.[22] Self struggled with mental health issues during this period, and aged 20 became a hospital outpatient.[23]
After graduating from Oxford, Self worked for the Greater London Council, including as a road sweeper, while residing in Brixton.[26] He pursued a career as a cartoonist for the New Statesman and other publications and as a stand-up comedian.[26] He moved to Gloucester Road around 1985. In 1986 he entered a treatment centre in Weston-super-Mare, where he claimed that his heroin addiction was cured.[22] In 1989, "through a series of accidents", he "blagged" his way into running a small publishing company.[27][28]
Self joined the Observer as a columnist in 1995.[1] He gained negative publicity in 1997 when he was sent to cover the election campaign of John Major and was caught by a rival journalist using heroin on the Prime Minister's jet; he was fired as a result.[31] At the time, he argued "I'm a hack who gets hired because I do drugs".[32] He joined the Times as a columnist in 1997.[1] In 1999 he left the Times to join the Independent on Sunday,[1] which he left in 2002 for the Evening Standard.[1]
He has made many appearances on British television, especially as a panellist on Have I Got News for You and as a regular on Shooting Stars. Since 2008 Self has appeared five times on Question Time. He stopped appearing in Have I Got News for You, stating the show had become a pseudo-panel show. Between 2003 and 2006, he was a regular contributor to the BBC2 television series Grumpy Old Men.[33]
Since 2009, Self has written two alternating fortnightly columns for the New Statesman. The Madness of Crowds explores social phenomena and group behaviour, and in Real Meals he reviews high street food outlets. For a May 2014 article in The Guardian, he wrote: "the literary novel as an art work and a narrative art form central to our culture is indeed dying before our eyes", explaining in a July 2014 article that his royalty income had decreased "dramatically" over the previous decade. The July article followed the release of a study of the earnings of British authors that was commissioned by the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society.[34]
Self has given his reason for writing as follows: "I don't write fiction for people to identify with and I don't write a picture of the world they can recognise. I write to astonish people."[36] "What excites me is to disturb the reader's fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable."[37]
Zack Busner is a recurring character in Self's fiction, appearing in the short story collections The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Grey Area and Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe, as well as in the novels Great Apes, The Book of Dave, Umbrella and Shark. Busner is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practising in London, and is prone to self-promotion at the expense of his patients. He is often the antagonist of the stories he appears in, although not always with villainous intent.
Among Self's admirers was the American critic Harold Bloom.[47] Journalist Stuart Maconie has described him as "that rarity in modern cultural life, a genuine intellectual with a bracing command of words and ideas who is also droll, likeable and culturally savvy."[48]
Political views
In the 2015 UK general election Self voted Labour in a general election for the first time since 1997. In May 2015, he wrote in The Guardian: "No, I'm no longer a socialist if to be one is to believe that a socialist utopia is attainable by some collective feat of will – but I remain a socialist, if 'socialism' is to be understood as an antipathy to vested interests and privileges neither deserved nor earned, and a strong desire for a genuinely egalitarian society."[49] In March 2017, he wrote in the New Statesman: "Nowadays I think in terms of compassionate pragmatism: I'll leave socialism to Žižek and the other bloviators."[50]
Self's mother died in 1988.[27] He was married from 1989 to 1997 to Kate Chancellor. They have two children, a son, Alexis, and a daughter, Madeleine. They lived together in a terraced house just off the Portobello Road.[54] In 1997, Self married journalist Deborah Orr, with whom he has sons Ivan and Luther. In 2017, Orr and Self separated, and Self was living in a rented flat in Stockwell.[2] Orr died on 19 October 2019.
Self has stated that he has abstained from drugs, except for caffeine and nicotine, since 1998. In 2024 he wrote: "I gave up smoking – and indeed, consuming nicotine in any way, shape or form – almost six years ago”.[55][56] In the same column he revealed that he had been diagnosed with myelofibrosis. It is a progression of the blood disease polycythaemia vera with which he was diagnosed in 2011.[57][58]
He has described himself as a psychogeographer and modern flâneur, and has written about walks he has taken.[60] In December 2006, he walked 26 miles (42 kilometres) from his home in South London to Heathrow Airport. Upon arriving at Kennedy Airport he walked 20 miles (32 kilometres) from there to Manhattan.[55] In August 2013, Self wrote of his anger following an incident in which he was stopped and questioned by police in Yorkshire while out walking with his 11-year-old son, on suspicion of being a paedophile. The police were alerted by a security guard at Bishop Burton College. He had asked the security guard for permission to cross the school grounds.[61]
In September 2018 Self was accused of "mental cruelty" by Orr in relation to their divorce, in a series of posts on Twitter.[62]
In 2016, the British Library acquired Self's archive; the collection is a hybrid archive of paper and born-digital material.[73] The Papers of Will Self are divided into two parts: family papers and personal and literary papers. The papers can be accessed through the British Library catalogue.[74]
Self has also compiled several books of work from his newspaper and magazine columns which mix interviews with counter-culture figures, restaurant reviews and literary criticism.
The Minor Character – Self's short story was turned into a short film on Sky Arts which starred David Tennant as "Will".
Related Research Articles
James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media. Ballard first became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962), but later courted political controversy with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes the story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968) and the novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists.
Sir Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize.
Andrew William Stevenson Marr is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster. Beginning his career as a political commentator, he subsequently edited The Independent newspaper from 1996 to 1998 and was political editor of BBC News from 2000 to 2005.
David Lionel Baddiel is an English comedian, presenter, screenwriter, and author. He is known for his work alongside Rob Newman in The Mary Whitehouse Experience and his comedy partnership with Frank Skinner. He has also written the children's books The Parent Agency, The Person Controller, AniMalcolm, Birthday Boy, Head Kid, and The Taylor TurboChaser.
Jeremy James Hardy was an English comedian. Born and raised in Hampshire, Hardy studied at the University of Southampton and began his stand-up career in the 1980s, going on to win the Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1988. He is best known for his appearances on radio panel shows such as the News Quiz and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.
Jonathan Saul Freedland is a British journalist who writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland also writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
Robert Patrick Webb is an English comedian, actor and writer. He rose to prominence alongside David Mitchell as the comedy duo Mitchell and Webb.
Michael Wayne Rosen is a British children's author, poet, presenter, political columnist, broadcaster and activist who has written 140 books. He served as Children's Laureate from 25 March 2007 to 23 July 2009. He won the 2023 PEN Pinter Prize, awarded by English PEN, for his "fearless" body of work.
Ronan Bennett is a Northern Irish novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his work as showrunner, writer and executive producer of the drug and gang-related crime drama television series Top Boy. His other writing credits include the 1997 crime film Face, the 2009 Michael Mann crime biopic Public Enemies and the 2017 BBC historical drama miniseries Gunpowder.
Thomas Holland is an English author and popular historian who has published best-selling books on topics including classical and medieval history, and the origins of Islam.
Edward Docx is a British writer.
Paul Mason is a British journalist. He was Business Editor of the BBC Two television programme Newsnight from 2001, and Culture and Digital Editor of Channel 4 News from 2013, becoming the programme's Economics Editor in 2014. He left Channel 4 in 2016.
Seumas Patrick Charles Milne is a British journalist and political aide. He was appointed as the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications in October 2015 under Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, initially on leave from The Guardian. In January 2017, he left The Guardian in order to work for the party full-time. He left the role upon Corbyn's departure as leader in April 2020.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Owen Jones is a British newspaper columnist, political commentator, journalist, author, and left-wing activist.
Richard Seymour is a Northern Irish author, commentator and owner of the blog Lenin's Tomb. His books included The Meaning of David Cameron (2010), Unhitched (2013), Against Austerity (2014) and Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (2016). Seymour was born in Ballymena, Northern Ireland to a Protestant family, and currently lives in London. A former member of the Socialist Workers Party, he left the organisation in March 2013. He completed his PhD in sociology at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Paul Gilroy. His thesis, dated 2016, was titled Cold War anticommunism and the defence of white supremacy in the southern United States. In the past he has written for publications such as The Guardian and Jacobin.
Harry Leslie Smith was an English writer and political commentator. He grew up in poverty in Yorkshire, served in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, and emigrated to Canada in 1953. After retiring, Smith wrote his memoirs and about the social history of 20th-century Britain. Smith wrote five books, about life in the Great Depression, the Second World War, and post-war austerity, and columns for The Guardian, New Statesman, The Daily Mirror, International Business Times, and the Morning Star. He appeared in public at the 2014 Labour Party conference in Manchester, and during the 2015 general election and the 2016 EU membership referendum. In Canada he made a 2015 "Stand Up for Progress" national tour.
George Eaton is a British writer and journalist. He is Senior Online Editor of the New Statesman, a position he was appointed to in February 2020. He was previously political editor from 2014 to 2018, joint deputy editor from 2018 to 2019, and an Assistant Editor from 2019 to 2020.
Stephen Kupakwesu Bush is a British journalist. He is columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times and has also written for The Guardian, The Telegraph,i and New Statesman.
Aaron Bastani is a British writer. He co-founded the left-wing media organisation Novara Media in 2011, and has hosted and co-hosted many of its podcasts and videos. After a 2014 video for the publication, he popularised the term "fully automated luxury communism", which describes a post-capitalist society in which automation greatly reduces the amount of labour humans need to do. He wrote a book in 2019, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, about the subject. Bastani has also written for The Guardian, London Review of Books, openDemocracy and Vice, and is known for his Twitter activity.
↑ Bloom, Harold (2002). Genius: a mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds. New York: Warner Books. p.648. ISBN0-446-69129-1. There are a few affinities, except perhaps with the admirable Antonia Byatt, in the generation after: novelists I also now admire, like Will Self, Peter Ackroyd, and John Banville.
↑ Stuart Maconie. "My People". Radio Times 2–8 February 2013, p.125
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
