The Bio by Yoel Noorali

Yoel Noorali is a writer living in London, England. His fiction has appeared in a range of publications, both online and in print. His work is primarily focused—though not entirely—on the 21 st century. Take an early example, Glimpses of Cities Through the Windows of Planes, a prose poem set in the clouds, looking down on our towns and skyscrapers. He also writes for film, television, and radio—but never for money. Ultimately, anything of value must come from the heart. The heart is the organ that pumps the blood that animates the hands as they type. To replace the heart in this process with the blunt pulse of money is to choke the life out of the writing. What you are left with is Gone Girl, written for a paycheque. But even our finest minds are sometimes victim to a similar impulse. Far be it from me to attack the hallowed Dostoevsky in an arena as ill-fitting as the bio, but he was a degenerate gambler in serious debt and since most of his so-called “major works” were released serially I believe he may have been paid by the chapter and so might have doled out pointless chapter after pointless chapter, way beyond what was called for, purely in order to fund his gambling habit. I’m sorry, it’s just how I feel. Readers deserve better. Readers are busy. They need writing that is concise, succinct, and to the point. It must be short and sweet: terse, pithy, breviloquent. In the 21st century, which I hope I know a thing or two about, a writer cannot, among other things, waste a reader’s time on flowery superlatives and caveats, except perhaps in the most elegant of elegant poetry (see: Glimpses of Cities Through the Windows of Planes). Only what is necessary may stay. Brevity is the soul of wit! Yoel Noorali travelled to meet and study for a time under the great Philip Roth, whose feedback was exactly this: brevity is the soul of wit! Brevity is the soul of wit! Philip Roth soon issued a restraining order against Yoel Noorali, but Yoel Noorali had this overturned in a counter-suit claiming “insufficient evidence.” Yes, he one-upped the mighty Roth! Still, Yoel Noorali took this holiest of lessons away with him—this lesson pertaining to wit, the soul of which we know is brevity—and perhaps his knowledge of this is what we can credit his astounding success to. Yoel Noorali is the recipient of numerous grants and multiple awards, awarded by dozens of awards bodies stretching from the Lakes of Killarney to the Caspian Sea. He is represented by David Lee of the Curtis Brown Agency, but is open to other offers. David Lee’s performance has frequently been found wanting. It pales in comparison to Yoel Noorali’s. Yoel Noorali is a regular, prodigious contributor to magazines, journals, periodicals, quarterlies, monthlies, weeklies, dailies, and assorted other written materials. He is the editor of The Atlantic. Since graduating from Goldsmiths University in 2013, with a first class honours degree in English Literature, his incisive, economical prose has been translated into as many tongues as there are nations (there are 195 nations). As already noted, he is based—to the degree anyone can be “based” anywhere in this 21st century—in London. But in reality, thanks to that very 21st century obsession “the internet,” he is based everywhere. Sat on the London Underground, he is striding across Japan. In a cab, he stares indifferently into India. Paused at a red light, he looks away from his phone and finds in the idle reflection of the Uber’s black exterior gently shuddering in the glass of a department store that it is still night in Regent Street and that he is amongst the midnight shoppers browsing within, part of the fleeting picture: a beige speck floating. And then the car resumes its journey, gliding through a city which daily grows older but looks newer and newer, more pristine, and suspended in the soft, amniotic quiet of the inner cab, the noise outside dampened to deadened thuds, the muffled screams of people having fun outside bars and restaurants, he sees that the second tower has just fallen. He sees California aflame. He sees a dog. To what degree is “Yoel Noorali” even based in the present anymore? Yoel Noorali is based in no time. Via the iPhone, we all travel through time as if pinballs in a great pinball machine, but particularly Yoel Noorali, whose mind has the capacity to expand farther across vaster distances. Born in Lisbon in 1991 (at 11:09 on September 27th (a Friday)) to a Portuguese father and mother of Celtic descent, Yoel Noorali transcended his origin in a manner exceeding others of his generation to become a man belonging to no defined space or age. This is something Yoel Noorali has explored at length in his fiction and also his non-fiction (he writes non-fiction too). But what of his method? What use is a list of his works—such as Shark In Formaldehyde and One Thousand Monkeys—without any knowledge of how each came to be? Yoel Noorali wakes early. In his stove-top coffee maker he makes six strong coffees, which he drinks one after the other whilst working first on a short story, then on his next novel. He does this every weekday until 10am, when he stops to begin the bloodless and heartless work he is forced to do for money: teaching. Yoel Noorali is a lecturer at Goldsmiths University (although currently on strike over a pay dispute). His writing can also be found on his Substack. Please follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Tumblr, and LinkedIn. He lives with his wife and cat.