“Self Wins the Booker Prize”. But no, the headline is a fiction. Umbrella lost last week.
And it would have perhaps been worse if he had won. A man like Will Self is steeped in failure, indeed his writing is possible because of failure. Success might have ruined him. Will Self made the point himself in his last summer Guardian Review piece on Modernism. He also recommended Gabriel Jasopovici’s Whatever happened to Modernism? – and both have been speaking in a series of evening talks on Modernism in London this autumn.