Geoff Dyer - Writing Career

Writing Career

Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; three collections of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes, Working the Room and Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (a selection from the previous two essay collections published in the US); and five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (on jazz), The Missing of the Somme (on the First World War), Out of Sheer Rage (about D H Lawrence), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, and The Ongoing Moment (on photography). 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 most recent book is Zona, about Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker (published in the UK and the US in Spring 2012). The book received a favorable review by David Thomson of The New Republic, who called it "so much more fun than the film it addresses."

Geoff Dyer was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2005.

For a lengthy discussion of Geoff Dyer's books see James Wood: From Venice to Varanasi - Geoff Dyer's Wandering Eye, The New Yorker, 20 April 2009

In 2009, he donated the short story "Playing with..." to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Dyer's story was published in the Fire collection.