Will Self Born Digital Archive
Find out more about our work on the Will Self Born Digital Archive project.
Find out more about our work on the Will Self Born Digital Archive project.

Collection area: Contemporary Archives
Project dates: Feb 2026 – Dec 2028
Contact: Callum McKean
Project summary: This born-digital collection offers a unique insight into the creative life and work of the contemporary English writer and journalist Will Self and his social environment. It is comprised of 47 floppy disks and 1 hard drive which contain drafts of his major novels, correspondence, and non-fiction writing from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s.
This material, which will be made available via a terminal in the Library’s Reading Rooms complements Will Self’s paper-based archive which is already accessible.
The completion of this project will mark the first time a UK repository has described and made available records from a hard-drive deposited as part of a personal archive.