Will Ashon

Will Ashon (born 1969) is an English novelist, former music journalist and founder of the Big Dada imprint of Ninja Tune records. Ashon was educated at Countesthorpe Community College and Balliol College, Oxford. In the mid-1990s he worked as a music journalist specialising in hip hop for publications including Trace, Muzik, Hip Hop Connection, Raygun and The Source. In 1997 he started the record label Big Dada Recordings in conjunction with Ninja Tune, signing and releasing albums by artists including Roots Manuva, Diplo, Speech Debelle and Wiley.

His published novels are Clear Water (2006) and The Heritage (2008), both with Faber and Faber. His third novel, work, was supposed to be published by 3:AM Press in 2010, the new publishing arm of 3:AM Magazine, alongside works from authors such as Steve Aylett. On July 16, 2010, Ashon released the book 3:AM were meant to be publishing ("work") plus two others in a zip file, containing each book in an .epub and .pdf format, citing the influence (perhaps slightly facetiously) of grime musician Wiley, who had recently given away all the music on his hard drive in a series of zip files. The "Zip Trilogy," as Ashon called it, consists of three books: 'Monsterboy,' 'work' and 'After The Non-Event'. 'Monsterboy' is a short, surreal novella apparently about Mike Tyson's mother in the afterlife. 'work' outlines the life and ultra-violent re-death of an illegal alien in an unnamed country, written in broken, lowercase English. 'After The Non-Event' (subtitled 'A Comedy'), perhaps the most conventional of the three, follows twenty years in the life of Simon, a member of an unnamed cult, from the moment when the "Event" the group has been waiting for fails to take place.