Colin Henry Wilson (born June 26, 1931) is a prolific British writer.

Wilson was born and brought up in Leicester. He left school at 16 and worked in factories and numerous other jobs while reading in his spare time. In 1956, at the age of 25, he published The Outsider, which examines the seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures (notably Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh) and aspects of alienation in their works. The book was very successful and was a serious contribution to the popularization of existentialism in Britain. Wilson was labelled as an Angry Young Man, though he had little in common with other members of the group.

Wilson's works include a substantial focus on positive aspects of human psychology such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. Wilson admired, and was in contact with, for example, humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Wilson also published in 1980 The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff, a text concerned with the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff, which forms an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic. Wilson essentially argues throughout his whole work, that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. In his view normal everyday consciousness buffetted by the moment is blinkered, and should not be accepted as necessarily showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us being completely immersed in wonder or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. To Wilson our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness can be seen to be as real as our experiences of angst, and indeed as we seem more fully alive at these moments, they can be said to be more real. Furthermore these experiences can be cultivated, as a side effect, through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work. Wilson tends to argue that compulsive criminality is a manifestation of a pathological attempt to gain peak experiences through violence. This effort is bound to fail in the long run, leading the criminal to greater extremes of violence or to a desire to be caught.