Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer (born 1958) is an English author. He has written a number of novels and non-fiction books, some of which have won literary awards. Dyer was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2005. Dyer was born and raised in Cheltenham, England, as the only child of a sheet metal worker father and a school dinner lady mother. He was educated at the local grammar school and won a scholarship to study English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After graduating from Oxford, he claimed unemployment benefits, and moved into a property in Brixton with other former Oxford students. He credits this period with teaching him the craft of writing. Dyer's debut novel, The Colour of Memory, is set in Brixton in the 1980s, the decade that he lived there. The novel has been described as a "fictionalization of Dyer's 20s". Dyer is the author of the following novels: The Colour of Memory (1989), The Search (1993), Paris Trance (1998) and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009).