Jason Horsley

Jason Horsley (born 1967), also known as Jake Horsley, Aeolus Kephas, Jason Kephas, and Jasun Horsley, is an English author, cultural commentator, and podcaster.

Jason Horsley is the youngest child of Valerie Walmsley-Hunter and Nicholas Horsley, chairman of Northern Foods (the company founded by Nicholas's father, Alec Horsley). His siblings are Ashley Horsley, a therapist, and the artist Sebastian Horsley (now deceased).

In 1991 Horsley disinherited his personal fortune and traveled to Morocco to live on the streets. In Tangier he befriended the author Paul Bowles.

After disinheriting his family inheritance, Horsley wrote The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery 1958–1999, published in 1999 by the academic publishers, Scarecrow Press. The book author blurb described Horsley as "an independent scholar and world traveler" due to Horsley's eschewing of a conventional education and his penchant for changing countries every few years. While he was living in Guatemala, he corresponded with the retired The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, who praised the work (something Horsley wrote about in a long piece on Kael in his most recent book, Seen & Not Seen.) Like Kael, Horsley placed violence, and the appeal of violence, at the heart of what movies are all about; the book was described as "the first full-length attempt by a critic not only to justify but to celebrate the legacy of violence in movies."

In June 2002, having moved to London, Horsley wrote Matrix Warrior in two weeks and signed a contract with Orion Publishing Group the following week. Published in May 2003, the book combined the plot of the 1999 movie The Matrix with the teachings of Carlos Castaneda, and argued (possibly satirically) that reality is an illusory construct designed to enslave humans and drain their life-force as food for "inorganic beings". According to the Fortean Times, Horsley publicly played the role of "the One" for a period during and after the release of the book, giving interviews in character. When asked by Elizabeth Wu how he would know if he was really the One, however, he replied, "Book sales."Matrix Warrior was also published in the US by St. Martin's Press. It is now out of print.

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