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Tim Etchells
Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer based in the UK whose work shifts between fiction, performance and visual art.
He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned Sheffield-based performance group Forced Entertainment.
His fiction includes The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer) (Duck Editions, 2001) and The Broken World (Heinemann, 2008). His monograph on contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment, Certain Fragments (Routledge 1999) is widely acclaimed whilst his recent publications include Vacuum Days (Storythings, 2012) and While You Are With Us Here Tonight (LADA, 2013).
Exhibiting and presenting work in significant institutions all over the world, Etchells is currently Professor of Performance & Writing at Lancaster University. He has made projects in collaboration with a wide range of musicians, artists and performance makers. He was a Tate / Live Art Development Agency ‘Legacy: Thinker In Residence’ Award winner in 2008, Artist of the City of Lisbon in 2014 and awarded the prestigious Spalding Gray Award in February 2016. Under Etchells’ direction Forced Entertainment were awarded the International Ibsen Award 2016 for their groundbreaking contribution to the field of contemporary theatre and performance.
Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
Tim Etchells is an artist and a writer based in the UK whose work shifts between fiction, performance and visual art.
He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned Sheffield-based performance group Forced Entertainment.
His fiction includes The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer) (Duck Editions, 2001) and The Broken World (Heinemann, 2008). His monograph on contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment, Certain Fragments (Routledge 1999) is widely acclaimed whilst his recent publications include Vacuum Days (Storythings, 2012) and While You Are With Us Here Tonight (LADA, 2013).
Exhibiting and presenting work in significant institutions all over the world, Etchells is currently Professor of Performance & Writing at Lancaster University. He has made projects in collaboration with a wide range of musicians, artists and performance makers. He was a Tate / Live Art Development Agency ‘Legacy: Thinker In Residence’ Award winner in 2008, Artist of the City of Lisbon in 2014 and awarded the prestigious Spalding Gray Award in February 2016. Under Etchells’ direction Forced Entertainment were awarded the International Ibsen Award 2016 for their groundbreaking contribution to the field of contemporary theatre and performance.
PUBLISHED WORKS
Author: Tim Etchells
Genre: Genre Fiction
Writing an online ‘walk-through’ to a computer game of Borgesian complexity can take up a lot of time.
So much so, it can be difficult to see things turning sour in the real world. As our narrator grapples with his players’ guide, life starts to intrude in troublesome ways. Things aren’t going so well with the live-in girlfriend and the job preparing ‘cooked circular food’ is getting increasingly hard to stomach. To top it all, the best friend is clearly depressed and acting weirder by the day. But despite all this, his attention is focussed on The Broken World – an engrossing, possibly addictive, adventure that takes him from town to town in a struggle with zombies, agents, puzzles and mysteries. It’s not clear which of these worlds – the real or the online – is the more challenging, or where survival tips are more urgently needed. What is clear is that he must work out solutions to problems involving life and love and happiness, not just in The Broken World, but in the real one too.
“...an exhilarating and poignant tale of love, loss and computer games that ought to make the leap from "cult classic" to"popular success"... The Broken World is ultimately a humane and heartfelt book, with a proper emotional core wrapped up in a giddying fantasia. It manages to be desperately sad and desperately funny at the same time. It is a book of big ideas, cunningly delivered through a slacker's shrug.”
- Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday“The paraphernalia of the cyberworld is lavishly reconstructed. Etchells is interested in the cross-contamination of both sensibility and syntax when virtual world leaks into reality. Compelling.”
- The Times Literary Supplement“The Broken World is absorbing and accessible, merging the cyber and everyday lives of an unnamed narrator who is obsessed with writing the walk through (or detailed strategy guide) for a shoot-em-up computer game.”
- Tina Jackson, Metro“One of the first books that truly examines how computer games and fiction can be intertwined. More than any book I've read, this feels a convincing portrayal of the life of a contemporary adolescent. Etchells manages to discover a strange poetry in this humdrum man's life. By the end of the novel we care about "The Broken World" almost as much as the narrator does. The Broken World is a genuinely new development in literary fiction.”
- Matt Thorne, Literary Review“The narrative voice is funny, likeable and impressively consistent, though Etchells has come up with an ingenious way of shoehorning in a few literary effects when he wants them: the narrator lifts uncharacteristic passages of lyrical description from other websites dedicated to The Broken World, and there are allusions in the game to The Waste Land, The Trial and Bleak House.”
- Thomas Jones, London Review of Books
Author: Tim Etchells
Genres: Fiction
2019 sees the publication of Endland, a comprehensive collection of Etchells’ short fiction exploring a distorted version of England.
The new book is a considerable expansion of the first Endland Stories volume published in 1999, adding more than 20 new stories, many previously unpublished and developing Etchells’ scabrous, satirical reflections on a nation in various forms of decline.
Conjured in a mix of slang, pub anecdote, folktale and science fiction, Endland is the nightmare unfolding just outside the window – a glitchy parade of aging bikers and ghost children, cut-price assassins and witless wannabe celebs.
The world fashioned by Thatcher, Google, NATO, ICANN, Brexit, Big Brother, Bin Laden and Trump needs new narratives to make sense of it. In Endland, with feverish wit and a broken compass, Etchells unpicks the myths and strange realities we’re caught up in.
“I respect this book – but I never want to read it again.”
- Jarvis Cocker“It’s a cracklingly original voice, and the stories are very funny.”
- The Guardian
Author: Tim Etchells
Genres: Fiction
Endland Stories is a series of twisted cautionary tales for the modern age.
From Northern cities under attack, through haunted supermarkets and tower blocks, the book is populated by till-girls, sad bikers, and drunken football fans.