Nothing is quite what you expect – not even the unexpected: how the only son of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker from the Midlands, who went to Grammar School then Oxford then moved around a lot and wrote a lot of books became ‘quite possibly the best living writer in Britain’ (Daily Telegraph) and why you should not miss this event.
The San Francisco Chronicle calls Geoff Dyer’s work: ‘Uproarious and unclassifiable’. If you know Geoff’s work, you will agree.
Among 24 books of fiction and non-fiction so far and armfuls of awards, Geoff has won national and international prizes for:
- best comic novel (Jeff in Venice)
- best book of travel writing (Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It)
- best book of critical essays (Otherwise Known as the Human Condition)
- best memoir (Homework)
He published a poetic, road-trip thriller; he has written about photography, film, poetry, jazz, travel, Englishness, life on an American aircraft carrier – anything, and that’s the point – making brilliant observations in an easy-to-read yet completely surprising way that will often make you laugh out loud and change the way you think afterwards.
He writes about a Tarkovsky film in one book and a homage to the 1968 war film: Where Eagles Dare in another (Broadsword Calling Danny Boy)
Geoff once wrote a book about not writing a book about D.H.Lawrence. The result is so hilarious that Steve Martin called Out of Sheer Rage ‘the funniest book I have ever read’
After so much has been said on the subject that you’d think there was nothing left to add, Geoff wrote a fresh, expertly researched and transformative book about the First World War called The Missing of the Somme. The Observer described it as ‘the great Great War book of our time’
Sukhdev Sandhu has compared the experience of reading Geoff Dyer to:
“the sudden elation and optimism you feel when you make a new friend, someone as silly as you but cleverer too, in whose company you know you will travel through life more vagrantly, intensely, joyfully.”
If you know Geoff Dyer’s work you will appreciate what a challenge it was to persuade him to come to North Norfolk but also why it was worth it. And you’ll know how mad it would be to pass up the opportunity to come and hear him in person.
So will you book your ticket now and join us or risk regretting it later?
You can’t say you weren’t warned….