Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is currently living in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at USC.
He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; two collections of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room; and many genre-defying books: But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, The Ongoing Moment, Zona, about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H W Bush , White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, and “Broadsword Calling Danny Boy”, about the film Where Eagles Dare. He is the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays, Life with a Capital L: Selected Essays by D H Lawrence, and and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney.
A selection of essays from Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room entitled Otherwise Known as the Human Condition was published in the US in April 2011 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
In the fall semester of 2012 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa, in the fall semester of 2013 he was a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York, in 2014 he was a Mellon Distinguished Scholar at Wits University in Johannesburg, and in the Spring semester of 2015 and the Fall semester of 2016 he was a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers, University of Texas in Austin. He is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 2015 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His new book See/Saw: Looking at Photographs is published in April by Canongate (UK) and in May by Graywolf (US).
Awards
But Beautiful winner of the 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize and shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize
Out of Sheer Rage finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, US
Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It winner of the 2004 W H Smith Best Travel Book Award
The Ongoing Moment winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi winner of the 2009 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition winner of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World shortlisted for the 2016 Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year.
Lannan Literary Fellowship, 2003
Winner of the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2006
GQ Writer of the Year Award, 2009
Windham Campbell Prize in Non-Fiction, 2015