Geoff Dyer | |
|---|---|
 Dyer at the 2023 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | 1958 (age 65–66) Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England |
| Alma mater | Corpus Christi College, Oxford |
| Notable awards | Somerset Maugham Award 1992 But Beautiful Best Travel Book Award 2015 |
Geoff Dyer (born 1958)[1] is an English author. He has written a number of novels and non-fiction books, some of which have won literary awards.
Dyer was born and raised in Cheltenham, England, as the only child of a sheet metal worker father and a school dinner lady mother.[2] He was educated at the local grammar school and won a scholarship to study English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After graduating from Oxford, he claimed unemployment benefits, and moved into a property in Brixton with other former Oxford students. He credits this period with teaching him the craft of writing.[3]
His debut novel, The Colour of Memory, is set in Brixton in the 1980s, the decade that Dyer lived there. The novel has been described as a "fictionalization of Dyer's 20s".[4]
Dyer is the author of the following novels: The Colour of Memory; The Search; Paris Trance; and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He wrote a critical study of John Berger – Ways of Telling – and two collections of essays: Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room. A selection of essays from these collections entitled Otherwise Known as the Human Condition was published in the U.S. in April 2011 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
Dyer has written the following genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (on jazz); The Missing of the Somme (on the memorialization of the First World War); Out of Sheer Rage (about D. H. Lawrence); Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It; The Ongoing Moment (on photography); Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker); and Broadsword Calling Danny Boy (about Brian G. Hutton's 1968 film Where Eagles Dare). In 2019, Out of Sheer Rage was listed by Slate as one of the 50 greatest nonfiction works of the past 25 years.[5] He is the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney.
His book Another Great Day at Sea (2014) chronicles Dyer's experiences on the USS George H.W. Bush, where he was writer-in-residence for two weeks. It has been described by David Finkel as
"what we've all come to expect from Geoff Dyer—another great book. I loved everything about it. It's brilliantly observed, beautifully written, incisive, funny, and filled with stirring truths about life and the value of service."
Billy Collins said:
"Geoff Dyer has managed to do again what he does best: insert himself into an exotic and demanding environment (sometimes, his own flat, but here, the violent wonders of an aircraft carrier) and file a report that mixes empathetic appreciation with dips into brilliant comic deflation. Welcome aboard the edifying and sometimes hilarious ship Dyer."
Dyer was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2005.[6] In 2014 he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
In 2013 he served as the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor[7] at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. He now teaches in the PhD program at the University of Southern California.
Dyer is married to Rebecca Wilson, chief curator at Saatchi Art, Los Angeles. He currently lives in Venice, California.[8] In March 2014, Dyer said he had had a minor stroke earlier in the year, shortly after moving to live in Venice, Los Angeles.[9]
