Q&A: Author Geoff Dyer talks writing inspirations, literary success

Geoff Dyer, who has traveled to locations from Libya to Singapore to Bahrain, said he takes every opportunity he can to see as much of the world as possible to then share it with his readers.

The British author has written 14 books, from philosophical fiction in “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi” to a in-depth analysis of a Russian art film in “Zona.” As a result of his range of genres, he has received acclaim in different literary circles; in 2009, the same year he won the United Kingdom’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for best comic novel, British GQ magazine named him writer of the year.

Dyer will speak with magician and actor Ricky Jay at the Hammer Museum on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. The talk is part of the museum’s Hammer Conversation series, a program in which famous artists are paired up and have completely free-form discussion. Admission is free to the public.

The Daily Bruin’s Rebecca Sarvady spoke with Dyer about his most recent project, in which he sailed with the U.S. Navy, the inspiration for his writing and his literary success.

Daily Bruin: This Thursday, you’ll be speaking with writer and magician Ricky Jay. Have you ever interacted with Jay before?

Geoff Dyer: I’m aware of him as an incredible magician, as somebody with this incredible encyclopedic mind and obsessive interests, and then I met him and we just got on really well … so I really liked the idea of having a public conversation with him. I’ve written about a wide range of things, but that’s all I’ve done. I’ve just written about stuff, whereas he exists in so many different incarnations … he’s this total renaissance man.

DB: Your wide range of writing includes work of both fiction and non-fiction. What causes you to write about such varied subjects?

GD: I’d reverse the question. In a way, it seems to me quite extraordinary that a lot of people just concentrate on sort of one area and limit themselves to one particular field of expertise and interest. There’s so much going on in the world that it seems perverse to have a very narrow focus. The other thing is that writing for me has always been a performance, a sort of self-education. It’s a very good way of getting to know about things that I’m very curious about.

DB: So where do you get your ideas from, in both the fiction and non-fiction fields in which you write?

GD: There’s a famous answer to that, an English joke. When some writer was asked where he got his ideas from he said, “Oh I get them from a man in Scumfield,” Scumfield being a really (crummy) town in the north of England.

DB: The most recent book you wrote, “Another Great Day at Sea,” follows your time as a two-week in-house writer aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. How did this opportunity come about?

GD: This writer Alain de Botton set up this thing called “Writers in Residence” … which was pledged to getting writers to be in residence in unusual places. He asked if there was any way I would like to go in residence and very quickly I realized it was a great chance to go somewhere that I might not have access to in my normal life.

Almost instantaneously I realized that meant really a military kind of place. I said, not thinking it might come about, “Oh if you could get me on an aircraft carrier that would be great.” And four months later he called and said “Yep that’s it, you got all the clearance you need,” and there I was, I was flying to Bahrain and from Bahrain I flew up to the carrier.

DB: Did you have certain expectations going in? How was that versus your experience?

GD: I knew it would be very big, because they’re famously big, but what I didn’t realize that as well as being big it would be incredibly crowded. This whopping great place with 5,000 people onboard. People are really crammed in there, partly because so much space is given over to the planes.

DB: You’ve won numerous book awards and critical acclaim for your books. In what way, if at all, has that affected you?

GD: I’ve really enjoyed this phase of things … I’ve published a lot of books. The first ones, which were only published in England, were greeted with such a lack of interest. Now, I’m really pleased that the books are getting read … I get asked to go to lots of festivals, but it’d be really misleading if I said, “Oh yeah, the great thing is, I get a chance to meet my readers” or, even more arrogantly, “My readers get a chance to meet me” because actually, what I think is best of all is that I am myself a reader, so I get invited to these things and then I get to meet a lot of the writers that I admire … that’s just fantastic.