My encounters with the famous ‘sage of Tetherdown’

The sage in Soho: Colin Wilson being interviewed in Soho, London, in 2009. On the table is a copy of his second novel ‘Adrift in Soho’, now a movie by Pablo Behrens. Photo: Colin Stanley

Friends give their personal recollections of the late philosopher-novelist Colin Wilson in a new book, The Sage of Tetherdown

How I came to receive an invitation from the prolific English author Colin Wilson to visit him at his home in Cornwall is extraordinary in itself.

For those who might not know, Colin, born in Leicester, UK, in 1931, wrote more than a hundred books on philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, music, criminology, the ancient world and prehistory, the occult and the paranormal, and more than twenty novels and novellas.

He left school at 16, had various jobs, including labourer, dishwasher and factory worker, spent a short spell in the RAF and lived briefly in Strasbourg and Paris, before publication of his best-selling first book The Outsider in 1956, which was an overnight sensation, not least because he was only 24 at the time. However, there was a critical backlash over Colin’s second book, Religion and the Rebel (1957), and this was when he and his girlfriend, later his wife, Joy, moved from London to Cornwall.

Colin Wilson in his garden at Tetherdown, 2004. Photo: GW