Matt Rowland Hill Longlist Author Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted?

Original Sins started as such a personal project: I began writing it in rehab, as an attempt to understand what had happened to my life after a decade of drug addiction that included spells in a psych ward and a homeless hostel, and a diagnosis of Hepatitis C. A part of me has never quite been able to get over the fact anyone would publish and read it. So to see it longlisted for a prize is, well, surreal. And wonderful, of course.

How did you conduct your research?

By making pretty much every mistake a person can make, and then sitting down and trying to remember them all.

Do you think there is an issue with the way we view addiction?

It’s almost a banality to say it at this point, but the problem with the way we view addiction as a society is that we see it as largely a medical problem for well-off and especially white users and a criminal one for the less lucky. But everyone knows the so-called war on drugs has failed – even the politicians who hypocritically prosecute it.

What I think is less well understood is that addiction isn’t a special condition from which some people suffer and others don’t. It exists on a spectrum. The modern west is undoubtedly the most over-stimulated – and therefore addicted – society there’s ever been. In other words, we’re virtually all addicts, to a greater or lesser degree – whether our “drug” is food, the internet, wealth, consumption, status, whatever. It’s convenient for us to see the junkie on the street as our image of the “addict” because doing so helps us ignore the way he or she holds a mirror up to the way we all increasingly live.

Is it difficult being open or is it more cathartic?

It was easy to be brutally honest at first because I didn’t imagine, at that point, anybody would read what I was writing. I just carried on in that mode.

As for catharsis, I’m not above taking it wherever I can find it. But, on the whole, I think there are better places to seek it than the blank page – for myself, at least.

What are you working on next?

Just a fun little comedy about devastating and all-consuming loss – if I can get it off the ground. I’m expecting it to be the blockbuster beach read of 2028.