Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left.

My name is Keir Milben and today I'm joined for a very special microdose by Womeng1, also known as Roberto Bui.

Thanks for joining us, Roberto.

Hi, thank you for having me.

Let me just do a little introduction for the audience.

So Roberto is part of a of Womeng, which is a writing collective in Italy, who've offered several collective novels together.

And Roberto has also produced several individual novels under the name Womeng1.

And in fact, you've also produced works of nonfiction.

And I'd probably say some works in between nonfiction and fiction, which we perhaps will get to in a moment.

Womeng emerged from what I see as a group of friends in the 1990s, who took part in activities under the collective pseudonym, Lutha Blissett.

So Lutha Blissett was a pseudonym under which people could sort of participate to build a collective myth.

I like the name, but I love the name Lutha Blissett, because the name is reference to a footballer who I remember from playing from Watford,

but who also played for AC Milan, who had a rather disastrous spell at AC Milan, actually.

So from that Roberto, I'm imagining that you're an AC Milan fan, is that true?

Not exactly, not exactly, but Lutha Blissett was quite famous because of his disastrous season in 1993, 1984 in the Italian League.

So he was frequently referred as an example of a foreign player who couldn't fit into the extremely defensive Italian game.

I remember he got signed for like a big amount which I can't remember, and then he got sold for a year later for like half that amount or something in the great tradition of British failures that I embraced wholeheartedly.

Let me just continue the story. So Lutha Blissett or the Lutha Blissett project that was a whole series of activities that took place under that pseudonym,

and some of which might be called sort of media pranks, or guerrilla media I remember was another term in the sort of mid to late 1990s that was current.

And then in 1999, a novel was released called Q, under the name Lutha Blissett, which is written by Roberto and three of his friends or co-writers who then went on after Lutha Blissett was a bit of a hit, actually.

The novel Q was a bit of a hit, then went on to form the collective Woming and to write novels, et cetera, et cetera.

Q was a really big novel for me, actually, Roberto. I have the words omnius and communion tattooed on my arm.

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