JO Morgan has published book-length poems on subjects as diverse as the 10th-century battle of Maldon and a future Martian returning to his abandoned mother planet, Earth. His book Assurances, about the RAF’s involvement in the cold war, won the 2018 Costa poetry award, while Interference Pattern (2016) was described in the TLS as “a poem that could come to be for the 21st century what The Waste Land was for the 20th”. Morgan’s latest book, Appliance, is a short novel told in 11 discrete chapters over a period of about 70 years, charting the advance of a new technology, teleportation, that arrives first as a fridge-like contraption and becomes, with each new version, more powerful and pervasive. Among other things the title, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Orwell prize, articulates beautifully current human anxieties about unregulated artificial intelligence. Morgan, 45, lives in a cottage on a farm in the Scottish borders.
What was the genesis of the book?
Stories stay in my mind over many years. A long time ago I had an idea for a book where the protagonist was this inanimate, unthinking thing and the people around it were a kind of Greek chorus. Then it was working out what sort of technology I wanted it to be. I didn’t want it to be a real technology, but I wanted it to be something [teleportation] that would be familiar to readers.
