Club Lunch – ‘Not a Reporter’: A Lunch with Writer Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer is a dazzling writer who defies categorisation. The author of four novels and numerous non-fiction books – they have won many literary awards and been translated into 24 languages – Dyer talked and answered guest’s questions about his travels in Asia and elsewhere and his absurdly varied range of work. That includes his experiences of Beijing in White Sands, of India in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, and of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia in Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It, his latest books on photographer Gary Winogrand and on the film of Where Eagles Dare (‘Broadsword Calling Danny Boy’), as well as his time on a US aircraft carrier (Another Great Day at Sea), an experience which he says “made me realise I’m not a reporter.”

Geoff Dyer – “One of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself, and one of our most original writers”, according to Kathryn Shulz of New York Magazine – is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography, the E. M. Forster Award and the Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Dyer currently lives in Los Angeles where he is writer-in-residence at the University of South California.