As a celebration of our alumni, each month we will highlight a new book written by one of Oxford's North American-based alumni.
For June 2017, our author is Geoff Dyer (Corpus Christi, 1977).
Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He 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. Additionally, he has written five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. Another Great Day at Sea, about his time as writer-in-residence aboard the USS George H W Bush, was published in 2014. His most recent book is White Sands (2016). A new book, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winongrand, will be published in 2018. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney.
In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi). In 2014 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He is currently Writer-in-Residence at USC, Los Angeles.
His website is geoffdyer.com
Order White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World on Amazon
Are you an alumni author?
If you have written a book which was published within the last three years, or is due to be released soon, please email us the following information.
Your full name
Alumni number (or college/year of matriculation)
Title of book
Date of publication
ISBN
Link to purchase the book online
We thank you for sharing your books with us, and will let you know if you are selected for a feature in the coming months.