Will Self

Will Self is an author and journalist who makes regular appearances on television, including on current affairs programmes such as Newsnight and Question Time. His satirical fiction is often grotesque and fantastical; he has said, ‘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.’ Will’s eleventh novel, Shark, is written as a single paragraph with no chapter breaks – The Guardian described it as ‘intellectually dazzling and emotionally frazzling.’Will Self will read from and talk about his novels Umbrella and Shark, the first two novels of a trilogy examining the disturbing relationship between technological advance, warfare and psychopathology in the 20th and the 21st centuries.