May 2023
February 2023
June 2022
Geoff’s new book The Last Days of Roger Federer is going to be BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week starting on Monday 4th July 2022. Click HERE to listen.
In case you haven’t read enough about Geoff’s tennis injuries, here’s an extended essay in the New Statesman about his elbow surgery.
Geoff’s book Out of Sheer Rage has been chosen by Craig Brown as one of his Top 20 Most Memorable Books after 23 years as a book critic. Read the Mail on Sunday article HERE.
January 2022
Geoff Dyer kicked off a week of programmes on Radio 4 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ways of Seeing, the 1972 TV series presented by John Berger. You can hear the programme HERE.
After the Festival of Writing and Ideas at Borris in Ireland in 2021 Geoff Dyer visited John Boorman at his home to film this conversation:
John Boorman and Geoff Dyer: Myth and Legend
Geoff Dyer’s piece on Elizabeth Taylor and the reissue of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is in the New York Times.
April 2021
See/Saw: Looking at Photographs 2010-2020 will be published in April 2021 by Canongate (UK) and by Graywolf (US) in May 2021.
A new book The Last Days of Roger Federer will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (US) and Canongate (UK) in May or June 2022. (This is not the tennis book Geoff failed to write several years ago. There are bits about Roger but it’s mainly about Nietzsche, Beethoven and Turner.)
December 2020
Oops! We have been very lax about keeping this website up to date. So here are some of the things that have happened since the last update.
Essays / Articles: 3 pieces on the early stages of the Covid pandemic appeared in the New Yorker, Part One, Part Two and Part Three.
In July 2020 Geoff published a very long essay in the TLS on reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.
In December 2020 the New York Times published a piece about how his copy of a Camus biography went missing.
November 2019
New York Review Books are publishing Geoff’s selection of essays by D. H. Lawrence, The Bad Side of Books (published in the UK by Penguin Classics as Life With a Capital L), on 12 November 2019.
October 2019
Geoff’s contribution to Is It Rolling, Bob? Talking Dylan is now available here. He also wrote an article about the experience for the Spectator which can be read here.
Geoff has a piece in the new issue of Freemans about (not) getting stoned in California.
May 2019
The Folio Society are publishing a facsimile of Alvin Langdon Coburn’s London & New York. These facsimiles of two volumes of luminous and evocative images, first published in 1909 and 1910 respectively, convey the urban beauty of London and New York in the age of steam. The original introduction and foreword, by Hilaire Belloc for London and by H. G. Wells for New York, are included. The facsimiles are accompanied by a separate leaflet featuring a specially commissioned introduction by Geoff Dyer and a new essay by Rut Blees Luxemburg.
February 2019
The excellent Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco is putting on an exhibition of Garry Winogrand’s photographs inspired by Geoff’s book The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand. The show is on from 12 Feb – 16 March 2019. For more information visit their website here.
If you are there before March 2nd also take a look downstairs at Chris Dorley-Brown’s exhibition ‘The Corners’ at Robert Koch Gallery. Geoff wrote about his work in the New York Times Magazine which you can read here.
In March Faber begin their programme of reissuing Thomas Bernhard’s novels. Geoff has written an afterword for Extinction.
January 2019
On 31 January Penguin UK will publish Life with a Capital L, a new selection of essays by D H Lawrence chosen and introduced by Geoff. The US edition will be published by NYRB Classics in November 2019 with a different title: The Bad Side of Books.
In February Pantheon will publish the US edition of Broadsword Calling Danny Boy: On Where Eagles Dare. See Events for readings, talks etc.
In December 2018 the Observer published an essay on books that Geoff finally got round to reading, years after acquiring them. Click here to read the essay.
September 2018
G D writes: Obviously I am not the only writer publishing a book this year but how many are publishing two? In March there was the big, illustrated book The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand from University of Texas Press. This will be followed in October by my little book on the film Where Eagles Dare, “Broadsword Calling Danny Boy” from Penguin UK. The US edition will be published by Pantheon in February 2019. Also in February 2019, Penguin UK will publish my selection of D. H. Lawrence’s essays Life with a Capital L.
Also on the film front, Il Saggiatore are publishing the Italian translation of Zona in September.
Also in September, Sasha Waters Freyer’s excellent film Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, featuring Geoff (pontificating from the sofa with his photographer friend Matt Stuart), has its theatrical release in the US on Sept 19th.
November 2017
Geoff has written the introduction to One, Two, Three, More, a new book of photographs by Helen Levitt, published by Powerhouse Books.
October 2017
Geoff’s essay on The Necks is published in the New York Times Magazine and you can read it here.
Geoff’s article on Lee Friedlander’s book The American Monument is published in the New York Times Magazine. You can read it here.
Belatedly, Geoff’s essay on his experiences at Wimbledon in 2017 (as a spectator) was published in the New York Times Magazine in August. You can read it here.
Geoff has contributed an essay on Andy Warhol, entitled “Old Sparky”, for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition “Andy Warhol. Dark Star” at the Jumex Museum in Mexico City. To find out more about the catalogue click here.
June
Geoff’s new book White Sands is the BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week every day at 9.45 am from June 27 – July 1st. Don’t miss it! Find out more information here.
Publications
Geoff has written the Foreword to The Abundance by Annie Dillard.
“Writing introductions to books by writers one loves is the absolute highpoint of the reading-writing life. If you’d told me when I was twenty-three, when I first read Camera Lucida, that I’d one day end up between the covers with Roland Barthes I’d probably have fainted with happiness. I feel similarly overjoyed and honoured to have written the foreword to Annie Dillard’s The Abundance.”
Geoff has written the Afterword to Matt Stuart’s wonderful book of photographs, All That Life Can Afford.
September
Late in the day Geoff has come to his senses and changed the title of his forthcoming book from whatever it was called – “the title was so long even I couldn’t remember it” – to White Sands. It will be published by Pantheon in the US in May 2016 and by Canongate in the UK in June 2016.
August
Geoff starts his new appointment as Writer in Residence at USC, Los Angeles.
June
Geoff’s new book, Where Do We Come From, What Are We, Where Are We Going, has been acquired by Pantheon, US, and Canongate, UK, and will be published in May 2016.
May
Geoff has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
March
Geoff has been awarded a 2015 Windham Campbell Literature Prize. Nine winners in three categories – nonfiction, drama and fiction – receive $150,000 each to support their work.
For the 2015 Spring semester Geoff is Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin.
Publications:
The paperback of Another Great Day at Sea is published in the UK by Canongate and in the US by Vintage. At the same time Canongate complete their reissue of all of Geoff’s books in a uniform paperback edition with the publication of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Out of Sheer Rage, and Working the Room.
The first Australian edition of Another Great Day at Sea will be published in March 2015 by Text.
Verso are reissuing Raymond Williams’ Politics and Letters with a new introduction by Geoff in March 2015. See Events.
Meghan Daum’s anthology Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids includes an essay by Geoff (published in March 2015 by Picador).
December News
Publications:
New story, Forbidden City, in the December 2014 issue of Harper’s magazine.
Essay in An-My Lê’s Events Ashore (Aperture).
Conversation with Janet Malcolm on photography in the Winter 2014 issue (217) of Aperture.
Geoff Dyer interviewed by Jonathan Lethem in BOMB: The Author Interviews (Soho Press).
Preface to The First World War: Unseen Glass Plate Photographs of the Western Front (University of Chicago Press).
May News
Geoff has a new book out in the US and UK in May 2014: Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H W Bush (US: Pantheon, UK: Visual Editions; eBook: Canongate).Also in May Graywolf in the US will publish Geoff’s first two novels, The Colour of Memory and The Search – a mere 25 and 20 years, respectively, after they were first published in the UK. The waiting is nearly over!
See Events for readings and talks taking place in the UK and US in May and June around these publications.
Also see Events for a conference in July in London about Geoff Dyer’s work.
Geoff has been elected an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
March News
Geoff’s Diary piece, Why Can’t I See You?, is published in the London Review of Books.
February News
The full text of Geoff Dyer’s Paris Review interview is now available online.
December News
The Winter edition of The Paris Review has an interview with Geoff entitled The Art of Non-Fiction. Click here to find out more.
November News
Geoff is presenting a Culture Show Special about DH Lawrence on Saturday 23 November on BBC2 at 10.15pm. To mark the centenary of the publication of Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers, Geoff and scholar Catherine Brown retrace the Alpine journey that Lawrence made with his lover Frieda Weekley in 1912. It was this trip which enabled him to complete his first masterpiece and also marked the moment when he decided to risk everything for his writing. For more information click here.
Publications
Understanding a Photograph by John Berger, edited and with an introduction by Geoff Dyer, published by Aperture in the US and Penguin in the UK
Geoff has contributed a map, The Boy Out of Cheltenham, to Where You Are: A Book of Maps published by Visual Editions.
Interview with Nietzsche in the Dead Interviews edited by Dan Crowe (Granta)
October News
Publications
Essay on Dayanita Singh in the catalogue for her retrospective, Go Away Closer, at the Hayward Gallery, London
Contribution to the Lawrence Weschler symposium in McSweeney’s Quarterly number 44
Contribution to symposium on Revenge in the Threepenny Review
Foreword to Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World edited by Steven Hoelscher (Harry Ransom Center)
Essay in catalogue for the exhibition Arctic at the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen
Past News
The Spanish translation of Zona will be published in June 2013 by Mondadori Spain.
The Brazilian edition of But Beautiful will be published in July 2013 by Companhia das Lettras.
The Portuguese transalation of Yoga for People who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It is out now, published Quetzal (May, 2013).
The Korean translation of But Beautiful will be published in South Korea in June 2013.
Geoff was guest director at the Telluride Film Festival (29 August – 3 September 2012).
Canongate have begun their programme of reissuing Geoff’s entire backlist (with the exception of Ways of Telling). Out of Sheer Rage is available as a Canon; Paris Trance, Yoga and But Beautiful were published in June 2012; The Missing of the Somme, The Ongoing Moment and a revised edition of The Colour of Memory were published in November.
Geoff won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition announced in New York on 8 March 2012.
Geoff has guest edited the Documents section of the Spring / Summer 2012 edition of AnOther Magazine out now, with articles written by Fiona Banner, Anne Carson, David Markson and others, and art by Melinda Gibson.
Mark Kermode talks to Geoff about his new book Zona and Tarkovksy’s film Stalker on the BBC’s Culture Show on Friday 10 February 2012.
Geoff was interviewed by Bryan Appleyard for The Sunday Times in February 2012.
The New York Times‘ Dwight Garner has chosen Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition as one of his Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2011. He says: “Mr. Dyer, a shape-shifting British writer, is among the best essayists on the planet, and this book includes some of his finest work. He casts an almost perversely wide net here. There are pieces about Ian McEwan and the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue and the jazz cornet player Don Cherry. He goes on tour with the aging rockers in Def Leppard and goes up in a decommissioned Russian MIG-29 fighter plane. He wanders though Camus’s Algeria. He reflects upon the joy of having sex in good hotels. What these essays impart is ecstasy.”
Check out this interview with Geoff conducted by American writer Jonathan Lethem for BOMB magazine.
Geoff’s new book Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room, is published in February 2012 by Canongate, UK and in March 2012 by Pantheon, US. The book takes the reader through the film Stalker by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and, like the film itself, confronts the most mysterious and enduring questions of life and how to live.
Geoff has been chosen by the UK’s Observer newspaper as one of Britain’s top 300 intellectuals! See the full list here.
Geoff’s book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (published April 2011 by Graywolf, US), was the subject of this interview with the Paris Review (19 April 2011).
Geoff has a long piece about land art in the New Yorker (18 April 2011) called Poles Apart – Notes from a Pilgrimage.
We just found this video of a hilarious reading Geoff gave at Damian Barr’s Shoreditch House literary salon in London. Enjoy!