My name is Robert Wringham. I’m a writer-comedian.
I lend my celebrated WISDOM and WIT to many things. I write short- and long-form humour, fiction, creative non-fiction, critical essays, and the odd polemical rampage. As a performer, I do comedy, readings, interviews with other comedy people, and talks.
My first book, You Are Nothing, was published by Go Faster Stripe in 2012. It tells the story of Cluub Zarathustra, the early work of comedians Stewart Lee, Roger Mann and Simon Munnery.
My second book, A Loose Egg, is a collection of short pieces and was shortlisted for the 2015 Leacock Medal for Humour.
From 2007 to 2017, I was editor and publisher of New Escapologist magazine, which is probably what I’m best known for. So much so that I brought the magazine back for a second volume in 2023 and it continues (two issues per year) to this day.
My New Escapologist-inspired book, Escape Everything!, was published by Unbound and distributed by Penguin Random House in 2016. It also became a bestseller in translation when published by Heyne in Germany, Austria and Switzerland as Ich Bin Raus (2016) and then by Cassiopeia in Korea (2018). It was refreshed and republished by Unbound in paperback in 2021 as I’m Out.
A sequel to Escape Everything! was commissioned in 2020 by Heyne. It’s called The Good Life for Wage Slaves in English and Das Good Leben in German.
Stern Plastic Owl (2021) is my second collection of short humour pieces, including the famous “Sex Life of H.G. Wells”. It was published by my friends at Go Faster Stripe.
My first novel came out in 2023. It won a Saltire Prize for our cover design.
For many years, I’ve written for print and digital magazines like The Modernist, The Skinny, Verbicide, CACTUS, Side Street Review, Splitsider, Meat, tMCQ, and the British Comedy Guide, Canadian Notes and Queries, Playboy, and the Idler where I had a column between 2016 and 2020.
I’ve performed at venues like Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, the Glasgow CCA, Mainline Theatre in Montréal, PEN Theatre in South London, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and in Katy McCaulay’s back garden. My current show is called The Annotated Audiobook.
Online, I have blogs here and here, and I sometimes contribute to Joshua Glenn’s pop culture website HiLobrow. If you like podcasts, there’s the hard-on-the-ears Punch and Judy Show I recorded between 2009 and 2012 with my friend Daniel Godsil: it’s old now but we still have fans out there.
Immune to popular wisdom, I have a thing for meeting my heroes. This has led me to interview or otherwise work with Luke Rhinehart, Will Self, Tom Hodgkinson Alain de Botton, Momus, Poly Styrene, John Dowie, Simon Munnery, Jo Brand, Neil Mullarkey, Stewart Lee, and Ian Macpherson among others. I’d like to do something with Dan Rhodes but he always says no.
I love a miscellaneous project. Some favourites were proof-reading Richard Herring’s The Box Lady (2013); editing Luke Rhinehart’s final novel, Invasion (2016); editing Tim Blanchard’s non-fiction Powysland (2018); directing a one-person show for Gabriel Featherstone (2019/20); and transcribing and panache-enhancing my friend Wentworth’s epic twenty-year travel journal (ongoing).
I grew up in Dudley before escaping in 2004. I try not to look back. I now live mainly in Glasgow and sometimes in Montreal. I read a lot of library books, walk stupidly-long distances for fun, listen to jazz music, and get my unstoppable energy from peaches. My name comes from James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Today, I’m working on these projects.
Email: r [dot] wringham [at] gmail [dot] com or info [at] newescapologist [ dot] co.uk
Photo: Max Crawford