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Paul Williams
Paul Williams is a psychoanalyst and writer. He worked for most of his adult life in clinical practice in London and Northern Ireland, before moving to California in 2016.
Following many psychoanalytic books and articles he turned to writing about the internal world, dream, fantasy and how these shape our view of reality, especially when our minds do not work. A trilogy (The Fifth Principle, Scum and The Authority of Tenderness) received widespread acclaim as a new, original genre of writing. His latest book, Nothing Happened, follows the extraordinary experiences of a soul-murdered man who, through catastrophe, good fortune and attempts to connect remaining slivers of his humanity to people he never knew existed or could possibly fathom, eventually confronts him with an unimaginable redemption.
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Paul Williams’ Nothing Happened is a masterpiece. The effect he creates is that of the experience of a dream, not the dream as remembered, but the dream as it is lived. Everything is what it is, nothing more and nothing less. The reader is moved to create layers of meaning, but these layers of meaning do not make a dent in the impenetrability of the narrator’s voice and his way of being. This is the nothingness being presented, an inscrutable surface that leaves the reader steeped in mystery beyond words.
—Thomas Ogden, author of Aunt Birdie and Other Stories and The Parts Left Out
Paul Williams’ new novel is a blend of fiction, reality and dream. He plunges the reader into the alienated but riveting inner world of a lost young man who by rights should have been dead long ago. Through a mixture of creative intelligence, good fortune and extraordinary encounters, this intuitive but disaffected soul is drawn towards an experience of redemption he could never have envisaged. Who else could write about a man committed to hauling behind him in a block of ice a cadaver who isn't quite a cadaver, in the service of humanity?’
—Glen Gabbard, APA & NIMH award-winning psychiatrist
For more than thirty years, I have admired and been instructed by Paul Williams’ profound, groundbreaking psychoanalytic writing about trauma and disturbance. In his three-part memoir, he recounted with searing vividness his own harrowing upbringing on Merseyside, the scars it left and the pathways he found to survival, exhibiting mastery of a new genre of writing and deep understanding of the damage humans can inflict upon one another. Now, in this heartbreaking and poignant tragi-comic odyssey, Williams’ first novel, we meet characters both strange and familiar and parts of ourselves we’ve either forgotten or never knew. Like Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot Williams evokes, the author takes us into the mind of a man who survives on the edge of death just long enough to find companions safe enough to shepherd him back into the land of the living. Read this book—it will take you to places in the heart and soul that are certain to deepen your experience of what it is to be human—and make you glad to be alive.
—Anthony Bass, Ph.D, author of It Takes Two to Know One
Another tour de force! Paul Williams sweeps you into a world of Micky Spillane, Dostoevsky and Sartre with echoes of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. Prepare to be shocked, amused and moved at the profound, non-exploitative understanding of bruised childhood.
—Valerie Sinason, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and author of Hotel Mirabelle & The Wonderful Wheelchair Company.
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Publisher : Sul Books
Published : March 2026
Formats : Perfectbound, Digital Cloth with Dust Jacket, EPUB
Pages : 308
Size : 6.14 x 9.21 in or 234 x 156 mm (Royal 8vo) 50 Cream
ISBN (hardcover) : 978-1-917898-12-6
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-917898-13-3
ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-917898-14-0
