British author Geoff Nicholson, "whose work examined the links between emotions, behavior, and location, notably in his novel Bleeding London," died January 18 at age 71, the Guardian reported. In 2014, Londoners and visitors were asked to follow the book's main character Stuart London and walk the entire 58,000 streets of the London A to Z atlas. An exhibition was later held at City Hall and prompted imitation by camera enthusiasts elsewhere in Europe.
Nicholson published 17 novels, 10 works of nonfiction, many short stories and anthology contributions, and several popular blogs. "His surreal, complex and sometimes transgressive comedies were only erratically successful from a commercial point of view," though his third novel, What We Did on Our Holidays, was adapted into the 2007 film Permanent Vacation.
His early books include Street Sleeper, Bedlam Burning, and Day Trips to the Desert, but Nicholson "did not capitalize on these early successes and remained... something of an outsider, at least in the U.K. But his work attracted a cult following, nowhere more so than in Los Angeles, where he lived and worked between 2006 and 2018," the Guardian noted. Other works include Footsucker and Sex Collectors, but as he got older, Nicholson turned his attention to walking, the theme of five of his last eight published works.
Shortly after he returned to Britain in 2018, Nicholson was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. For the most part it was controlled and he "went out walking, every day, padding streets near and far. Always armed with a camera, he did his research, took photos, picked up items of interest--an unusually colored rock, a discarded magazine or an item in a junk shop that took his eye," the Guardian wrote. These observations found their way into The Suburbanist (2021).
In his final work, Walking on Thin Air: A Life's Journey in 99 Steps (2023), he wrote "candidly about his illness, although it was more a celebration of life than of mortality," the Guardian noted. "He did not expect this to be his swansong, but proved to be a prophetic subtitle."
