Wide, Wide World: In Conversation With Geoff Dyer

• Geoff Dyer's memoir 'Homework' (2025)  paints a vivid portrait of growing up in 1960s and 70s England.

• Dyer writes on a wide range of subjects because he finds the world a very interesting place.

• Dyer says that being a writer is like being a perpetual student

While in India to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival this year, acclaimed British writer Geoff Dyer spoke to Vineetha Mokkil about his love of travel, his penchant for experimenting with forms and style, and his reasons for finding everyday situations intriguing. Dyer is the author of four novels and several non-fiction books, including 'But Beautiful', 'Out of Sheer Rage', 'The Ongoing Moment', 'The Last Days of Roger Federer', 'The Missing of the Somme' and 'Homework'. His canvas spans a diverse range of subjects such as war, travel, film, photography, jazz, art and history. An intrepid traveller who finds the world an infinitely interesting place, Dyer says, “By the end of one’s life one wants to have been everywhere…”

In your memoir 'Homework' (2025), you paint a vivid portrait of growing up in 1960s and 70s England. What prompted you to write it and do you think there’s a right age to be writing a memoir?

There’s a book by B.S. Johnson published in the 1970s with the great title 'Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?' I wrote mine when I was in my mid-60s, and crucially, that was after my parents had died. It was this that really motivated me to write the book because suddenly they were no longer there and there were all sorts of things I wanted to say. It’s my way of saying to them, too late, stuff that I could have said when they were alive. But I was keenly aware that a sort of a door had been shut on my past. There was an interesting historical process that I lived through and I was the only person uniquely placed to tell this particular story. Of my particular experience. And of course, by definition, I was the leading expert in the field. It’s a question of preserving a kind of England which sort of lingers, but is unrecognisable now in many ways. 

In what ways? 

Healthcare worked so efficiently and was free then. There was this wonderful free education. I went to Oxford—that was all free—and was able to leave university without any debt. I was a fortunate beneficiary of that historical moment which has now passed…My memoir ends when I get a place at Oxford, but that era has passed. It came to an end with the election of Margaret Thatcher, I think. Some sort of change was necessary because that level of state subsidy is not sustainable, but if you were lucky enough to enjoy the boom time, then you have to write about it. 

There are no writers in your family as such, right?

Absolutely none at all. And what that meant is that there wasn’t really much documentation. It’s not like there was a big archive. There are only about 50 letters in the Dyer archive.

Not only were there no writers in my family, there were no readers. Thanks to the influence of a teacher at school, I became very interested in reading. If you really love reading, and especially if you come from a world in which there are no books, there’s something very intense about the relationship you have with literature. It’s quite natural to feel that you’d like to have a go at producing some of this stuff yourself. So that’s how I became a reader straight out of the influence of school. 

Who are some of the writers you read at that age?

There were so many, but all the ones in the canon—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens. All the British ones and also American writers like Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, they’re the kind of writers who were important to my generation. 

I’m very conscious that in terms of contemporary writers, for many years, I was just reading male writers. And one of the great sources of happiness for me in the last 15 years is to be reading women writers. Tessa Hadley, Elizabeth Taylor, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, Shirley Hazard, there’s so many on my reading list. 

It was my loss not to have read women writers. Doesn’t matter though, because I came to my senses eventually and in good time. It means that I’m really able to appreciate them now properly. 

Any particular genres you tend to avoid?

I’ve never been able to take an interest in reading thriller writers or ‘murder books’ or whatever. Actually, it’s quite disturbing the number of books you read by men, which are about murdering their wives. That’s a genre I have no interest in. I’d never write one of those. There’s never any action of any kind in my book.

Why is that?

I’m much more interested in regular situations. I find them intriguing enough. It’s the same thing when I’m watching a TV series. I will often enjoy the first few episodes and then I don’t like it when the plots become really ridiculous. I’m interested in the real. I find, even in films, fights and explosions and all that stuff boring.

You experiment a lot with forms. Some of your books don’t have any chapters.

That’s just the way it happens. It’s not like I’m anti-chapters, but it suits me for some reason. Let me make it clear that it’s not a statement or strategic principle. I experiment with forms and the reason for that, I think, is because I’ve written books about many subjects. And of course, a form that is appropriate for one subject is not appropriate for another. So, the jazz book is written in a way that’s suitable for jazz. That is to say, it’s a series of improvisations. But then I had to find another form in order to write my history of photography. The crucial thing is that the material, the subject matter, ends up generating a form as opposed to me coming along and imposing a form on the subject matter. So, it’s that idea of formal closeness to the material. 

It’s quite fascinating that you’re able to take an interest in so many different kinds of subjects.

Well, it’s an interesting world, and there’s many different things to be interested in. And I like finding out about things. Say, when I first heard Indian classical music, I loved it so much, couldn’t understand it, but it made me very keen to come to India. And although I still don’t really understand it, I was very happy to try to convey it in my book, 'Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi'. There are scenes in the book where I’m describing a concert. I like to think that I sort of articulated in that scene what it was like for me to listen to this wonderful violinist, N. Rajam. 

And in the case of 'The Last Days of Roger Federer': I’ve loved Beethoven for a long time and I thought, I’ll try to explain what it is about those late Beethoven sonatas and string quartets that I love. So, for me, it’s always like being a perpetual student, trying to learn new stuff all the time. 

Is travel also part of it? 

Absolutely. There’s no distinction to me between something I’m doing at home in my study, and activities I do in faraway places—they’re all experiences. And the two things, of course, are always reinforcing each other, because you go to a new place, and there you learn about the music in that place, or the writers, the films, the food, all of that. 

Any advice for aspiring travel writers?

You must always be taking notes because it’s unbelievable how quickly even an experience you think has imprinted itself very vividly on your mind, it’s remarkable how fast it fades, especially when you’re travelling. Quite often, you can have one amazing experience, which is rapidly overlaid by another amazing one. So, it helps to take notes.