{"id":3141,"date":"2012-03-20T22:02:38","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T22:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=3141"},"modified":"2016-06-22T17:03:08","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T17:03:08","slug":"r-n-morris-and-michael-gregorio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?p=3141","title":{"rendered":"R. N. Morris and Michael Gregorio in conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"R<\/a><\/p>\n

About Roger Morris<\/span><\/h4>\n

Born in Manchester in 1960, R. N. Morris now lives in North London with his wife and two young children. His series of St. Petersburg novels revolving around the character of Porfiry Petrovich include\u00a0A Gentle Axe, A Vengeful Longing<\/em>, which was shortlisted for the 2008 CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger for Best Novel and was Highly Commended in the CWA Ellis Peters Prize for Best Historical Crime Novel in 2008.\u00a0A Razor Wrapped in Silk<\/em>\u00a0was publsihed in 2010,\u00a0and his fourth book,\u00a0The Cleansing Flames,\u00a0<\/em>was shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger in 2011. He also wrote\u00a0Taking Comfort<\/em>\u00a0which was published by Macmillan under the name Roger Morris in 2006. His latest novel,\u00a0Summon Up The Blood<\/em>, is published in April 2012. (see\u00a0Faber and Faber Authors<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Visit \u00a0his website:\u00a0http:\/\/rogernmorris.co.uk\/<\/a><\/p>\n

About Michael and Daniela Gregorio<\/span><\/h4>\n

\"Gregorios\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio write together as Michael Gregorio. Daniela teaches philosophy; Michael is interested in the history of photography. They live in Spoleto, a small town in central Italy. They have created a series of crime novels whose central charater is the Prussian magistrate, Hanno Stiffeniis. The series includes\u00a0Critique of Criminal Reason, Days of Atonement, A Visible Darkness\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Unholy Awakening<\/em>. (Faber and Faber Authors<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Visit their website:\u00a0http:\/\/www.michaelgregorio.it\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael and Daniela: Did you always think that you would be a writer, Roger, and, if you did, what sort of a writer did you think that you would be?<\/p>\n

Roger: Pretty much, yes. Writing stories was always my favourite activity at school. Even the way I played was story-based, making up convoluted scenarios for myself and my friends to act out. Telling stories is one of the ways we make sense of the world. We\u2019re encouraged to do it as children and then at some point we switch to a more academic way of writing. Essays – based on\u00a0facts<\/em>. For me at least, at the school I went to, the imaginative, creative approach to writing \u2013 making stuff up \u2013 was discreetly put to one side. So it became something I pursued in private. For many years. Quite early on I took hold of the misguided idea that being a writer would be a great job. The misguided part was that it was a job at all, when actually it\u2019s an obsession. You don\u2019t turn up to work, work for a certain number of hours and get a pay cheque at the end of the month. In fact, you\u2019re doing well if you\u2019re getting paid at all. To answer the second part of your question, all I can say is that I didn\u2019t particularly see myself as a crime writer. That came quite late on. If there is a spectrum with storyteller at one end and literary writer at the other, I have always thought of myself as being at the storyteller end. Fundamentally, that\u2019s what it\u2019s about for me, telling stories.<\/span><\/p>\n

How about you two? Did you always see yourselves as writers, and if so what sort?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Gregorio<\/a>Michael: I was a kid who always wrote smart formulaic essays in school. English and History? No problem. I read English at university, and fell in love with long novels. They were more fun than Anglo-Saxon, which I also studied. I always fancied writing a novel, but I never had the time. When I came to Italy in 1980, I started worrying about forgetting my English \u2013 I was trying so hard to learn Italian \u2013 and I began writing short stories, then novels set in Italy as I got more ambitious. Pretty soon Daniela was at it, as well. She\u2019d always been a scribbler. She still has pre-school notepads covered in incomprehensible hieroglyphs! By the mid-1990s, Dani was teaching philosophy and reading horror \u2013 Stephen King, James Herbert \u2013 and she tried her hand at the genre, too, while I was diddling about with the Victorians and crime. One day she came up with an intriguing idea for a short story set in Prussia featuring her favourite philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and our joint ambition took off. Could we write a novel set in K\u00f6nigsberg in 1804, and if so, what kind of novel would it be? Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About Roger Morris Born in Manchester in 1960, R. N. Morris now lives in North London with his wife and<\/p>\n

Continue readingR. N. Morris and Michael Gregorio in conversation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":5781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3141"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3141"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5783,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3141\/revisions\/5783"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}