Stewart Home (born 1962) is an Afro-Celtic writer and artist. His first book was: The Assault on Culture : Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) ISBN 094851888X.
His other works have included;
Stewart Home is infamous in European, particularly British, counter-culture as a media prankster, although he has also made his mark in America and Canada. He is reknowned as something of a scholar with what can appear to be an encyclopaedic range of knowledge, particularly of esoteric literature, avant-garde art movements, original British punk rock bands, the minutiae of disputes and feuds between obscure political sects, and the whole of Hegel's 'Aesthetics'. All of these interests inform and expand his prolific publishing history across fiction and non-fiction.
It is also rumoured (and admitted by Home himself in his 1997 'Suspect Device' anthology published in the UK by Serpent's Tail) that 'Stewart Home' is not an individual but a collective identity used by a number of writers.
There are a number of interests and agendas pursued and pushed by Home whose declared aim is 'to reinvent world culture in its entirety'. One of these interests is the process of historification by which fabrications and rumours become printed facts and enter history as truth. The first Home book, The Assault on Culture : Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) ISBN 094851888X is, at face value, a useful scholarly work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, at that time at least. been under-documented. Upon closer analysis (and Home's own admission), the book is merely a vehicle for his own historification of Neoism, a 'movement' that Home salvaged, (and ultimately savaged) from the hands of a group of mail artists mainly based in Canada and which continues to expand from his helping, mythologising, documenting hands. His 1995 novel "Slow Death" fictionalises and ridicules this process of the historification of Neoism, (including the planting of archives at the Victoria and Albert Museum which recently occurred in actuality when Home sold the V&A his own archive on Neoism) as if to give his own game away but, typically with Home, as soon as one agenda has, apparently, been exposed, whether Home's own or one 'at large', the game moves on so that Home constantly forces readers into a position of 'Should I believe any of this?'
The Home take on that question is always that 'Belief is the Enemy' and this and other slogans such as 'Demolish Serious Culture' , although not Home's own, represent 'shortcuts' through the highly energised, hilarious and often disturbing path that Home weaves. From leftist politics, the occult, popular and unpopular culture, music, art and whatever else 'he' has an opinion on (just about everything), Home makes sure that he cannot and will not be ignored, without sacrificing his own manic approach and without kow-towing to established edict. A cult writer who is also something of a cult to write about, the Stewart Home canon can seem marginal and esoteric one year only to become prophetic and vital the next before receding into marginality again. (Most of his works are out of print at the time of writing but this will undoubtedly only provide an opportunity for a freshening relaunch.)
With his most recent published novel '69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess' (Canongate, Edinburgh 2002), he has finally got the British literary press sitting up and taking notice, ironically, of a book which carries his most acidic and astute condemnations of the literary and cultural establishment.
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