About
Welcome to WillBuckingham.com. I am a writer, philosopher and lecturer based in Leicester, UK. I have a couple of books to my name – a novel Cargo Fever published by Tindal Street Press, and a philosophy book Finding Our Sea-Legs, published by Kingston University Press. There’s also a children’s book forthcoming from Scholastic, called The Snorgh and the Sailor, about which I will say more closer to the time. And I’ve got a fair few short stories, articles and other things dotted here and there, not to mention my blog, thinkBuddha.org, now into its sixth year.
When not writing, I teach at De Montfort University in creative writing. I’ve also taught philosophy at Staffordshire University, and before starting my university teaching I worked for seven or eight years worked on a number of writing and philosophy projects and residencies (not necessarily at the same time), including a few years working as writer in residence for the Heart of England NHS trust, a couple of years working with schools for the Write On project, and various bits and pieces of work with people such as Ixia, the public art think-tank, the Birmingham Book Festival, Writing West Midlands, BookTrust and so on.
I’m still up for the occasional side-project if it seems like it might be fun, and if time and writing commitments allow.
A few of my preoccupations
Philosophy is a big one. Another preoccupation is stories. I wrote my PhD on the places where philosophy and stories meet. I’ve a background in anthropology, and still have anthropological interests. More recently, I’ve been occupied with learning Chinese, part of a two-book project I am working on. Progress is steady, but not exactly fast. And I have quite a few years of Buddhist practice behind me, so I maintain an interest in this, although I do not identify myself as a Buddhist. I happen to think that one of the best books in existence is Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe, and if I had to hang around alone on a desert island, I’d favour this over the Bible any day.
Disambiguation
There are a few Will Buckinghams that I am not. For the sake of clarity, I should say that I am not the exceptionally talented bass player, who you can find on YouTube – well worth a watch, and he’s a friendly guy. Nor am I the scholar, Will Buckingham, who has written on the household registration or hukou system in China. This Will Buckingham, I suspect, speaks rather better Chinese than my own relatively feeble efforts.
About this site.
This site is made with textpattern. The little images were made by Tomikichiro Tokuriki in the 1930s, and appear in Paul Reps’ Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, and the book can be bought from Tuttle Publishing.
