1. Who are you?

Roger Morris. Oh shit. I’m supposed to spend at least one minute answering this? My name* alone is not enough then? You want something a bit more profound, philosophical, existential, at the very least, insightful? Something a bit more revealing perhaps? The local paper (Crouch End and Muswell Hill Times) described me as “46 year-old father of two”. That do ya?

2. What do you write?

Well, fiction would cover it. Urban contemporary obsessive anxiety-soaked edgy strange fiction. Maybe dark would be a word you could throw in there. Maybe humour plays its part too. As R.N. Morris, I also write historical crime fiction set in St Petersburg, Russia, in the 1860s. Hmm.

3. Why do you write what you write?

I write the contemporary edgy stuff because that’s how I feel, most of the time. Anxious. Nervous. Very nervous. I write the historical stuff because I had this idea. And I wouldn’t let it lie. Just had to go and see if there was anything in it. Other than that, I write because I have always written. And I write what I write because I can’t think of anything else.

4. Why should we read what you write?

Oh. Now. I wouldn’t want to force it on anyone. But I bumped into a friend who was reading my novel, Taking Comfort. There is a scene in that where Rob Saunders, the main character, positions his computer monitor by adjusting his fancy-dan desk. My friend had been suffering from a bad neck. She adjusted the level of her monitor, after reading that passage, and her neck got better. There are all sorts of helpful bits of advice like this in it. Stuff about knives. And mushrooms. And body armour.

5. Is the world a better place because of what you write?

There’s one less person with a bad neck. And if I wasn’t writing it I would be even more anxious. Therefore the sum total of anxiety in the world would be higher. I don’t know if reading the book will make people more or less anxious though. Kathryn?

*There are 604 people in the U.S. named Roger Morris.

Roger Morris’s is available from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, Abebooks.com, Abebooks.co.uk, Play.com.

About the Five Minute Interview.

Authors are given 5 questions and spend one minute answering each question.

[Next Friday’s Five Minute Interview: Foster Trecost]