Will Self

Arvon Live Writing Day: Writing about place

Join Will for two Masterclasses delivered live and in-person at the Arvon Live Writing Day this Sunday from 9.30am at Hebden Bridge Town Hall. Will and Amy Liptrot will share some of their own methods of exploring an area – on foot, in words – and give you a chance to try them out. Do places have their own voices? Do they carry memories? How can we as writers tune into and translate them? You will consider what makes successful place writing as well as what makes you an individual.

There will be opportunities to be inspired by the landscape of Hebden Bridge and the Calder Valley as well as places from your own experience and imagination: town or city, island or forest, kitchen or carpark, map or cloud.

For more details and booking, visit the Arvon website.

On Damien Hirst

Will’s Multicultural Man column on the artist JG Ballard rhapsodised as “a novelist who writes very short books”:

“Arguably, never in the decline and fall of the avant-garde had so few sold out for so much so quickly. From 1997, when the Royal Academy daringly mounted the Sensation exhibition, in less than five years, the likes of Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn et al., went from maybe scandalising to definitely cashing in: far more than the Britpop bands, it’s these lite – and often quite high – artists who personified the Blair era, with its serious comfort when it came to being seriously rich sugar-wrapped in social conscience.”

Ports Fest evening

Will is going to be exploring the ways we remember the fiction we read in our youth, the role of memory, and our views of facticity at Ports Fest in Portsmouth on Thursday 30 June from 7.30pm till 9.20pm. He will also read from his latest book, Will: A Memoir. For tickets, go here.