Matthew Hilton

My relationship with writing began twenty years ago when I took a trip on a cargo boat into the Baltic. At that time I was known for my graphic artworks and on board that ship I engraved metal plates to print up later. But I also kept a journal in parallel and when I got back on shore it was published with the images as /Flagships for New Reaches/. Why I say the relationship began then is because, in my caravan on the coast under the rattling rain I got, for the first time, a critical distance away from the surface of my prose as I worked on drafts. The life walked in and stole my thunder for a while and it wasn`t until quite a time after that I had another serious wrestling match with text - and this time it was in French. As part of an exhibition I produced a five thousand word account of my arrival in France; was I an immigrant, an expat or an exile? The process went from my first draft in English to a translation collaboration and then into a full re-write by me in French. Satisfying. The booklet was called /De La Franqui à Ramonville/. As a result of that work I was offered the chance to do an artists book and I ransacked my life for a series of erotic episodes, published under the title /My way of loving Beasts/. The fate fell on me with a thunk. I was a volunteer at an Amnesty International Booksale and had the right to pick myself a book. My hand fell on /Gangs and Countergangs /an account of the Mau Mau rebellion in British held Kenya in the 1950`s. You could say I dropped everything; opening the book at a photo of a gang blacked up and dressed in thrift store disguises I said "Opera". I let most of my life drop away for several years while I struggled with the material. It is now in the hands of Australian composer Taran Carter & we are looking to produce as /Mau Mau - the Opera/. By now I had stopped my art stuff, the process of physically transforming materials started to sicken me, and I set off into my first full length book /Heavy Waters/. I did everything you should, bum on the seat every day, watch those adjectives and so on - but I couldn`t get a hearing for it so I self-published. And then I thought why not? At my age my focus can`t be on making a career - I have stuff I want to process, using imagination and language, and put out into the digisphere, the rest can wait; my kids can profit.

You have to ask yourself what is a book now with surfing and everything. Doesn't everybody go thru their days now with this mysterious weave of fact and fiction - inside and outside?
My latest ebook Tap once if Human is designed to live in hyperspace, perhaps for years, out there somewhere; its contents sometimes referenced or found, an artefact among the millions.
I know it is a terrible cliche but it is true, you write a book to explore, to get to the place you would never have known about until you started writing the book - or at least I do. I wrote this one to explore that funny frontier in the mind where there's something you can't grasp - happens pretty quick for me in mathematics. I went with this into the realm of artificial intelligence and its application to crowds, to us people type things, to the huge spaces inside ourselves available for automating.
I cast my story as hard science, imagined settings and a scramble of fictional tropes including erotics. I guess my key word is playfulness - look at the films of Miguel Gomes for example. I don't pause too long on anything and I subscribe to the stuff happens theory of life, it is literature en passant… To give you a feel - of the writers of my own generation it is Murakami Haruki that I feel closest to.