Will Eaves
Poet, Novelist
About
Will Eaves is a novelist, poet, editor and composer. His first three novels (The Oversight, 2001; Nothing to Be Afraid Of, 2005; This Is Paradise, 2011) view family life through a lens of sexual obsession, theatrical comedy and dismay. They sit in a tradition that might best be described as ‘the domestic macabre’. Three volumes of poetry have also evoked grief, hilarity and the magical transformations of the natural world. Murmur, his novel about Alan Turing, won the Wellcome prize and the Republic of Consciousness prize in 2019.
Since 1995, Will has pursued parallel careers as an editor and teacher. For nearly twenty years he worked at the TLS, and from 2011 to 2020 he was an Associate Professor in the Writing Programme at the University of Warwick. In 2019 he co-founded the Brixton Review of Books, a grassroots literary journal for which he wrote a regular column. He is also a performer and screenwriter: his prose collection, The Absent Therapist (2014), has been turned into an audio drama, and a film of Murmur is in development. In 2022, Will was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
A deep scepticism of vocation underpins Will’s interests in literature, music, art and science. He writes for the piano and co-hosts the Neuromantics, a podcast about literature and neuroscience, with Professor Sophie Scott. He is single, but lives in hope, and has made his home in Brixton, South London, for the past thirty-five years.