De Engelse schrijver Geoff Dyer werd op geboren 5 juni 1958 in Cheltenham als enig kind van een plaatwerker vader en een schooldiner dame moeder. Hij ging naar school in zijn geboorteplaats en kreeg een beurs om Engels te studeren aan het Corpus Christi College in Oxford. Dyer is de auteur van vier romans: “The Colour of Memory”, “The Search”, “Paris Trance”, en “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi”, een kritische studie over John Berger, “Ways of Telling”; drie bundels essays “Anglo-English Attitudes”, “Working the Room” en “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition” en zes andere titels die niet direct tot een specifiek genre behoren: “But Beautiful” (over jazz), “The Missing of the Somme” (over de herdenking van WO I), “Out of Sheer Rage” (over D. H. Lawrence), “Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It”, “The Ongoing Moment” (over fotografie), en Zona (over Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker uit 1979). Hij is de redacteur van “John Berger: Selected Essays” en mede-redacteur, met Margaret Sartor, van “What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney”. In 2014 verscheen “Another Great Day at Sea” (2014), waarin Dyer vertelt over zijn ervaringen op de USS George H.W. Bush, waarop hij twee weken meevoer als writer-in-residence. In 2005 werd Dyer Fellow van de Royal Society of Literature. In 2014 werd hij verkozen tot Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 2013 werd hij benoemd in het prestigieuze ambt van Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor, verbonden aan het Nonfiction Writing Program van de Universiteit van Iowa. Hij doceert tegenwoordig aan de Universiteit van Zuid-Californië.

Uit: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

“On an afternoon in June 2003, when, for a brief moment, it looked as if the invasion of Iraq had not been such a bad idea after all, Jeffrey Atman set out from his flat to take a walk. He had to get out of the flat because now that the initial relief about the big picture had worn off – relief that Saddam had not turned his non-existent WMD on London, that the whole world had not been plunged into a conflagration – the myriad irritations and frustrations of the little picture were back with a vengeance. The morning’s work had bored the crap out of him. He was supposed to be writing a twelve-hundred-word so-called ’think piece’ (intended to require zero thought on the part of the reader and scarcely more from the writer but still, somehow, beyond him) that had reached such a pitch of tedium that he’d spent half an hour staring at the one-line email to the editor who’d commissioned it:
‘I just can’t do this shit any more. Yrs J.A.’
The screen offered a stark choice: Send or Delete. Simple as that. Click Send and it was all over with. Click Delete and he was back where he started. If taking your own life were this easy, there’d be thousands of suicides every day. Stub your toe on the way to the bathroom. Click. Get marmalade on your cuff while eating toast. Click. It starts raining as soon as you leave the house and your brolly’s upstairs. What to do? Go back up and get it, leave without it and get soaked, or … Click. Even as he stared at the message, as he sat there on the very brink of sending it, he knew that he would not. The thought of sending it was enough to deter him from doing so. So instead of sending the message or getting on with this article about a ‘controversial’ new art installation at the Serpentine he sat there, paralysed, doing neither.
To break the spell he clicked Delete and left the house as if fleeing the scene of some dreary, as yet uncommitted crime. Hopefully fresh air (if you could call it that) and movement would revive him, enable him to spend the evening finishing this stupid article and getting ready to fly to Venice the following afternoon. And when he got to Venice? More shit to set up and churn out. He was meant to be covering the opening of the Biennale – that was fine, that was a doddle – but then this interview with Julia Berman had come up (or at least a probable interview with Julia Berman) and now, in addition to writing about the Biennale, he was supposed to persuade her – to beg, plead and generally demean himself – to do an interview that would guarantee even more publicity for her daughter’s forthcoming album and further inflate the bloated reputation of Steven Morison, the dad, the famously overrated artist.”

 
Geoff Dyer (Cheltenham, 5 juni 1958)