DURHAM LITERATURE FESTIVAL 2000

 

GEOFF DYER

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham in 1958. He ‘rode an educational escalator’ which took him from the local Grammar School to Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

His first book, Ways of Telling, published in1986, written while living on the dole in London, was a critical study of the writer John Berger, who has been the biggest influence on his subsequent writing. In 1989 he published The Colour of Memory (Cape/Abacus), a novel which recorded the life of a group of friends in Brixton.

In 1990 he was one of four writers – with Jenny Diski, Marina Warner and Edmund White – who each contributed a 15 minute script based on the theme of Seduction which was broadcast on Channel 4. In 1991 he spent three months in New Orleans, writing the first draft of the novel, The Search, which was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1993. A Shadow into the Future, the radio adaptation of his book The Missing of the Somme wasbroadcast on the eve of the 80^th anniversary of the Somme on BBC Radio 3.

But Beautiful, has been acclaimed in the United States, as the best book ever written about jazz. He has written on art, photography, Indian classical music, sculpture, boxing and film. Going far beyond the call of journalistic duty he spent three days with heavy rockers Def Leppard in Seoul, South Korea for the Guardian. For Esquire he has flown in a Mig-29 over Moscow, learnt to scuba dive in Egypt, abseiled in Australia and travelled around the deserts of Western United. He has recently returned from white-water rafting in the Zambesi. Esquire also sent him to learn to free-fall parachute. Dyer completed his training and then, chickened out. The account of his own inadequacies that was subsequently published turned abject failure into a triumph. His latest novel, Paris Trance was published in paperback in March 1999 and a collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes, was published in September 1999.