John Higgs, Writer

“The book already exists in the future and you’re just trying to reveal it – you’re just trying to find out what it is.”

I love the writing of John Higgs. It was a chance encounter with The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds that first switched me on to his unique literary landscape.

It’s a landscape where there’s a surprise round every bend, a place where diverse ideas intermingle to create flashes of illumination - and it’s peopled by figures as diverse as William Blake, Timothy Leary, The Beatles, James Bond and Dr Who.

His book Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century should, in my opinion, be compulsory reading for, well, everyone really.

And John is not just one of our most brilliant writers of non-fiction, he’s also – as you’ll discover in this conversation – a really lovely bloke.

We talk about the power of synchronicity, why writing is akin to washing up, how come he never has writer’s block and how he stays inspired. Oh, and John describes the moment he reached forty and had to decide whether to go all in on being a full time writer or not – a choice, as he puts it, between being bitter or penniless.

You‘ll also learn more about Alan Moore’s concept of Ideaspace, Bill Drummond’s Liberation Loophole and John’s own multiple model agnosticism.

You’ll find John’s site here and his excellent newsletter here.