Colin Wilson - Writings On Mysticism, Conciousness And Exictentialism

Colin Wilson was one of the most prolific, versatile and popular writers of the past 50 years. He was born in Leicester in 1931, and left school at sixteen. After he had spent years working in a wool warehouse, a laboratory, a plastics factory and a coffee bar, his first book, The Outsider, was published in 1956. It received outstanding critical acclaim and was an immediate bestseller. He wrote many books on philosophy, the occult, crime and sexual deviance, plus a host of successful novels that won him an international reputation. His work has been translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Hebrew. Colin Wilson died in December 2013.

Colin Stanley was born in Topsham, Devon, UK in 1952 and educated at Exmouth School. Beginning in 1970, he worked for Devon Library Services, studying for two years in London, before moving, with his wife Gail, to Nottingham where he worked for the University of Nottingham until July 2005. He is Colin Wilson’s bibliographer, Managing Editor of Paupers’ Press and has worked part-time for the Universities of Oxford and Nottingham Trent, spending the rest at the cinema and theatre, listening to music, writing, editing, reading and watching cricket. He is the author of two experimental novels and several books and booklets about Colin Wilson and his work including students’ guides to his ‘Outsider Cycle’, ‘Occult Trilogy’, ‘Existential Criticism’ and, most recently, An Evolutionary Leap: Colin Wilson on Psychology. He edited Around the Outsider a festschrift for Wilson’s 80th birthday and wrote a Foreword to the 2015 Watkins edition of The Occult. He is also the editor of Colin Wilson Studies, a series of books and extended essays written by Wilson scholars worldwide, and convener of the 2016 and 2018 International Colin Wilson Conferences at the University of Nottingham. His collection of the author’s work forms the basis of a Wilson archive at the University which now includes many of his manuscripts, letters, journals, etc. He now resides with Gail by the River Trent, close to Trent Bridge cricket ground.

Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English existentialist philosopher-novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism".