Will Self

Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011 line up highlights

Grant Morrison, Will Self and Jo Nesbø among highlights

A selection of international authors, a bunch of Scottish novelists, an array of top non-fiction scribes, a host of children’s writers and a series of exciting innovations: yes, it’s just another Edinburgh International Book Festival programme. A cliché…

Spirit of Jura

While various coffee houses of the Scottish capital have taken credit for providing the caffeine-fuelled watershed for JK Rowling’s career, few places have such literary resonance as Jura. The iconic isle was the isolated spot where George Orwell, fresh…

Will Self - Umbrella

Self's first Booker long-listed work is a challenge to literary conventions

An extravagant beast of a tome, Umbrella’s long-listing for the 2012 Booker Prize – Will Self’s first – suggests a line in the sand being drawn after last year’s panel called for ‘readability’. But someone needs to further represent the voice of…

Will Self

The author on his upcoming reading of Fleck with Alasdair Gray

I’ve known Alasdair Gray for a long time now, nearly 20 years. We had the same publisher in England and he came to one of my events in Glasgow, probably in about 1982 or ‘83. We did some other events together around that time and struck up a…

Will Self: ‘The Last Refuge of Greatness’

As part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, everyone’s favourite funny-looking writer, satirist, aesthete and husband of Deborah Orr discusses his lifelong fascination with scale, and investigates the way in which changes in scale influence artistic…

Work by photographer Chris Close returns to 2010 Edinburgh Book Festival

Portraits of visiting authors appear in Charlotte Square for second year

Chris Close, the photographer behind last year's successful 'almost live' photography display at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, is set to return to Charlotte Square this year with a new series of portraits of visiting authors. Visiting…

Will Self at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

A is for Alice in Wonderland A voracious reader as a child, Will Self skipped between adult and kids’ fiction, including reading all 650 pages of Frank Herbert’s Dune at the age of ten. But the book that had the biggest impact on the mind of the young…

Will Self - Liver And Other Stories

Moments of brilliance are too often lost

'If you are offended by a certain four letter word beginning in 'c' and ending in 't',' Will Self addresses his salt-and-pepper Edinburgh Book Festival audience, 'I suggest you leave now. If you are of a nervous or emotional disposition, I suggest you…

Rodge Glass

Analysing icons of football and fiction

‘Faith is something that preoccupies me, definitely, but it is usually the lack of it,’ says Rodge Glass, the Glasgow-based Jewish author of No Fireworks and Hope for Newborns who passed through a staggering range of variously religious, private and…

Will Self - The Butt

ALLEGORICAL TALE (Bloomsbury) Will Self’s latest novel is an allegorical tale of cause and consequence, which probes the addictions of the ‘liberal West’. Tom Brodzinski thoughtlessly flips his last butt onto Reggie Lincoln’s head, setting off a chain…