J. O. Morgan – författare

**Finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022 **From the Costa Award winner, a highly inventive and and humane novel about our relationship with technology and our addiction to innovation.This is the tale of a new technology, an alternative history that unfolds over many decades. It is a fable told through a constantly shifting cast of characters, all drawn into the world of a machine that slowly alters every life it touches.But in this unending quest for progress, what will happen to the things that make us human: the memories, the fears, the love, the mortality? As we push towards a brave new world, what do we stand to lose?'Such a super novel' Wendy Erskine'A clever book...that will have you thinking about the machines in your own life' Sunday Times

**WINNER OF THE COSTA POETRY AWARD 2018****SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION**A war-poem both historic and frighteningly topical, Assurances begins in the 1950s during a period of vigilance and dread in the middle of the Cold War: the long stand-off between nuclear powers, where the only defence was the threat of mutually assured destruction.Using a mix of versed and unversed passages, Morgan places moments of calm reflection alongside the tensions inherent in guarding against such a permanent threat. A work of variations and possibilities, we hear the thoughts of those involved who are trying to understand and justify their roles. We examine the lives of civilians who are not aware of the impending danger, as well as those who are. We listen to the whirring minds of machines; to the voice of the bomb itself. We spy on enemy agents: always there, always somewhere close at hand.Assurances is an intimate, dramatic work for many voices: lyrical, anxious, fragmentary and terrifying; a poem about the nuclear stalemate, the deterrent that is still in place today: how it works and how it might fail, and what will vanish if it does.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE TS ELIOT PRIZE 2020**From the winner of the Costa Poetry AwardA lone martian returns to Earth. He leaves behind him a hardened survivalist culture, its muddled myths and songs, its continued abuse of the environment that sustains it. During this journey back to the now-broken and long-abandoned mother planet, the martian begins to consider his own uncertain origins, and his own future.Cut off from his people, the martian's story is that of the individual: his duty at odds with his desire; the race of which he's still a part playing always on his mind, as well as the race that once was. This is the story of what life becomes when stripped of all that makes it worth living - of what humans become when they lose their humanity.The Martian's Regress is a brilliant, provocative, often darkly comic work that explores what a fragile environment eventually makes of those who persist in tampering with it.

Handicapped at school by his dyslexia and facing the strap at home, Rocky seeks out his own education from the fields and streams around him on the Isle of Skye. He develops an instinctive talent for improvisation: cord to snare rabbits fashioned from nettle stalks, a bicycle from scrap metal, a trip to France with just a few coins in the pocket of his shorts. Lyrical and continually surprising, this is a heroic narrative on a down-to-earth scale.

At first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects – dualities, ambiguities, boundaries – through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference.This is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact – depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions?Volatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J. O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, Interference Pattern is a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.