Michael Smith

Michael Smith (UK) is a writer and filmmaker. The author of the cult-classic The Giro Playboy, his work has also featured in The Guardian, Esquire, and Dazed & Confused. He has written and presented BBC4 documentaries (Citizen Smith, Drivetime) and had a regular slot on BBC2's The Culture Show. He also collaborated with Andrew Weatherall on a spoken word album of Unreal City. 

At Crossing Border he will talk about his latest novel Strangers on the Shore.
The flâneuring Michael at the centre of the book has moved down to the 'dogshit capital of the South Coast,' started a family and opened a bar. He finds himself pouring wine in a 'drinking town with a fishing problem,' philosophising, procrastinating, morbidly obsessed with Aleister Crowley, who died in poverty in a BnB in this shabby seaside resort full of artistes and occult morris dancers. 

A book about what it is like to live on the margins, sliding into a precarious middle age in  turbulent times, both giving up and starting a-new, Strangers on the Shore is deeply and  unashamedly romantic, whilst also angry about the dystopian Britain.
Revered by Andrew Weatherall as 'the acid house Montaigne' and The Idler as 'Rimbauld on the dole,' Michael Smith has written an endlessly moving book of  transcendent beauty about fathers and songs and the pleasures of an introspective life.