A short life of the author
William Woodward Self (b. 1961) was born on 26 September 1961 in London, the son of Peter Self, a professor of political science at the London School of Economics, and Elaine Rosenbloom, an American Jewish publisher. He grew up in East Finchley, was educated at Christ’s College, Finchley, and studied philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford. His early adult years were marked by heroin addiction — an experience that informs his fiction’s unsentimental understanding of dependency, altered consciousness, and the pharmacological manipulation of reality.
Life and Career
Self’s debut, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), a story collection, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and announced his characteristic style: mandarin prose, elaborate conceits, and a satirical vision that treats the grotesque as normative. Cock and Bull (1992), a pair of novellas about gender metamorphosis, established his taste for Swiftian body horror.
My Idea of Fun (1993) was his first full novel — a picaresque about a young man apprenticed to a malevolent mentor figure. Great Apes (1997) reversed the premise of Planet of the Apes: a man wakes up in a world where chimpanzees are the dominant species and humans are zoo exhibits. It is his most commercially successful novel and a devastating satire on human self-regard.
How the Dead Live (2000) imagined the afterlife as a North London suburb. Dorian: An Imitation (2002) transposed Wilde’s novel to the 1980s and 1990s, with Dorian as a bisexual socialite moving through the AIDS crisis.
The Book of Dave (2006) alternated between a deranged London taxi driver’s misogynistic diary and a future society that has adopted his ravings as scripture — Self’s most ambitious satirical construction.
The late trilogy — Umbrella (2012), Shark (2014), Phone (2017) — represented a radical formal turn. Written in dense, unpunctuated, stream-of-consciousness prose inspired by Joyce and Döblin, these novels were Self’s bid for high-modernist seriousness. Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Self is also a prolific journalist, television personality, and psychogeographer. His walking expeditions — from London to New York’s JFK Airport, for instance — have produced distinctive travel writing.
Major Works and Themes
Self writes about the body, the mind, and the pharmacological and technological forces that distort both. His fiction is populated by addicts, psychopaths, bureaucrats, and visionaries, and his London — a city of concrete, corruption, and hallucinatory strangeness — is among the most vivid in contemporary fiction.
His prose style is deliberately excessive: polysyllabic, syntactically complex, studded with technical and medical vocabulary. It is a style that either exhilarates or exhausts.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Self occupies an unusual position in British letters — admired by critics, avoided by most readers, and impossible to ignore as a cultural presence. His influence on satirical and experimental British fiction is real but limited, because his style is essentially inimitable.
Key Works
- The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991)
- My Idea of Fun (1993)
- Great Apes (1997)
- How the Dead Live (2000)
- Dorian: An Imitation (2002)
- The Book of Dave (2006)
- Umbrella (2012)
- Shark (2014)
- Phone (2017)
Collecting Self
Will Self first editions are collected by enthusiasts of British literary fiction.
The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991, Bloomsbury, London) — his debut — had a small first printing. Fine copies in jacket bring $100–$300.
Great Apes (1997, Bloomsbury) is the most commercially popular title at $50–$150.
Umbrella (2012, Bloomsbury) — the Booker-shortlisted novel — is available at $30–$100.
Self signs at events and literary festivals. Signed copies are moderately available.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cock and Bull Two novellas: in the first, a woman grows a penis; in the second, a man grows a vagina; Self uses bodily transformation to explore gender, power, and sexuality with characteristic philosophical rigor and transgressive humor — the body as site of social construction made grotesquely literal. | 1992 | Bloomsbury | English |
| Great Apes An artist wakes to find the world is ruled by chimpanzees and humans are mute zoo animals — Self's Swiftian satire on human nature, cognitive science, and the illusion of human exceptionalism, rendered in painstaking detail with chimpanzee social behavior replacing every human convention. | 1997 | Bloomsbury | English |
| Grey Area Self's second story collection — tales of psychological extremity, drug culture, bodily horror, and social satire set in a recognizable but slightly warped London; includes 'The North London Book of the Dead' and other pieces that established Self's reputation as the most distinctive short-fiction voice of 1990s Britain. | 1994 | Bloomsbury | English |
| How the Dead Live Lily Bloom dies and discovers that the afterlife is a dull London suburb where the dead continue their neuroses; Self creates a metaphysics of death as administrative bureaucracy, exploring how lives unlived and selves unacknowledged persist beyond physical existence. | 2000 | Bloomsbury | English |
| My Idea of Fun Self's first full novel — a young man with an eidetic memory is initiated into evil by a figure called The Fat Controller who may be the Devil; a Faustian narrative set in Thatcher's London, exploring the relationship between visual imagination, consumer capitalism, and moral corruption. | 1993 | Bloomsbury | English |
| Phone The final volume of Self's modernist trilogy — the smartphone as prosthetic consciousness, the Iraq War as imperial catastrophe, and Zack Busner's dementia as the dissolution of narrative itself; Self's most sustained meditation on how technology has altered the architecture of human thought. | 2017 | Viking | English |
| Shark The sequel to Umbrella — Zack Busner's consciousness ranges from the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 through post-war psychiatric institutions to the 2010s, all filtered through Self's unbroken stream-of-consciousness prose; the shark of the title is death itself, circling beneath every surface. | 2014 | Bloomsbury | English |
| The Book of Dave A London cabbie's deranged rant is discovered 500 years later and becomes the basis for a theocratic society — Self's most ambitious novel, alternating between present-day London and a flooded future England where Dave's Knowledge has become scripture, satirizing religion, masculinity, and urban tribalism. | 2006 | Viking | English |
| The Butt A holidaying Englishman flicks his last cigarette and it lands on an old man's neck — in this unnamed postcolonial country, a cascade of criminal penalties ensues; Self creates a Kafkaesque satire on Western tourism, colonial guilt, indigenous justice systems, and the absurdity of cultural encounter. | 2008 | Bloomsbury | English |
| The Quantity Theory of Insanity Self's debut short story collection — the title story proposes that sanity is a finite resource (if someone recovers, someone else must go mad); wildly inventive, blackly comic fiction that announced a major new voice in British writing; winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. | 1991 | Bloomsbury | English |
| Umbrella Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — a stream-of-consciousness novel moving between 1918, 1971, and 2010, following encephalitis lethargica patients, their psychiatrist, and the long aftermath of World War I; Self's most formally ambitious work, written as a single unbroken paragraph indebted to Joyce and Döblin. | 2012 | Bloomsbury | English |
| Walking to Hollywood Three novellas blending autobiography, fiction, and psychogeography — Self walks across Los Angeles, investigates the death of a concept, and collapses the distinction between real and imagined selves in what amounts to a memoir of walking, mental architecture, and the dissolution of narrative certainty. | 2010 | Bloomsbury | English |