Below are selections from interviews Matt has done over the years with links to the full interviews on-line where possible (most recent first):

May 2013, PaperPlanes website:
“I love that science fiction stories can be hopelessly optimistic, or very melancholic. I love that you can travel to the stars and explore unknown planets; or you can be miniaturized and injected into a person to explore what makes us who we are. Science fiction has resurrected dinosaurs, destroyed planets, folded space and found gods. There isn’t another genre that even comes close to that. If the world is a stage in terms of dramatic literature, then it is the universe and all of time that is science fiction’s stage. The opportunities to write within its borders are staggering. I love the freedom it offers…” – Read More

April 2012, Adventures in e-publishing, R.N. Morris website:
“I think to fully explain what I’m trying to achieve here, is to go back to what I did with the Macmillan New Writers blog. I set that up largely because I loved that sense of community. Here were all these wonderful new authors being published by one of the big six publishers in the world, and really we knew very little about the publishing business. We needed a place to come together in order to support each other.” – Read More

May 2010, The Literary Project website:
“I’ve been writing stories since I could hold a pen. I was no good at drawing and I fiercely wanted to tell stories, so perhaps this was the logical step. I was brought up around story-telling – my parents were voracious readers and loved films. It all seemed very natural to me. When I was a boy I wrote World War Two stories, generally about lone British soldiers getting stuck behind enemy lines who end up killing hundreds of Nazis, usually in nasty ways. One story involved several crocodiles – so you can imagine what happened. My teachers where quite worried about me – I was eight years old at the time.” – Read More

February 2010, Un:bound Website:
“When I was about ten years old, I stood on tip-toes and pulled the paperback of Frank Herbert’s Dune from the highest shelf I could reach. My love affair with the written word began then. While my peers were reading The Hobbit or Famous Five, I was reading – yet barely understanding – Herbert’s epic about sandworms and messiahs. I never looked back.” – Read More

March 2009, Un:bound Website:
“In Matt’s bio he mentions that he has been struck by lightning, twice. Well obviously I needed to hear that story. The first time they got hit Matt and his wife were travelling through Australia and were at Echo Point in the Blue Mountains. It is apparently impossible to get a photo of the three sisters view without other people in it, because it’s always so busy. On this occasion the weather turned suddenly and lightning hit the metal hand rail shocking through everyone holding on to it including Matt and Sarah. Once their vision settled and the rain vanished they darted out of the shelter of the kiosk and “got the photo”. Remarkably they were both unhurt. The second time, they were walking hand in hand on a golf course in Bournemouth, complete with golfing umbrella, which got hit by lightning, passing through both of them and terrifying a local. Matt says “nobody will stand next to us in a storm now”. Probably wise.” – Read More

February 2009, Sci-Fi Now Magazine
“What I really wanted to read was a book with muskets and monsters in; so why don’t I just write it? I tell you, it was a bloody nightmare to get anyone to look at it (The Secret War), because a lot of the agents couldn’t get a handle on it. The stock replies were that there was too much history in it, or there’s not enough horror. So we’re back writing as Stephen King again!”

January 2009, The Sheffield Telegraph
“In the meantime Curran has made a slight diversion from the genre with book no.3, a Victorian thriller called The Black Hours. ‘It’s based on a What If premise – what would happen if someone purposely unleashed the Black Death on Victorian London,’ he explains.”

January 2009, The Sheffield Star
“The sequel (The Hoard of Mhorrer) was written four years after the first and uses some of the same characters. Matt made a hash of the first draft but after that it was plain sailing. ‘It was familiar territory,’ he says, ‘A bit like going round to a mate’s house after four or five years and picking things up from there.'”

December 2008, Pan Macmillan Website interview
“Outside of the genre bubble, if you call a book a fantasy, non-fantasy readers expect there to be dragons and elves, and with SF they expect spaceships and robots. There’s a lot more to fantasy and science fiction than that, but the genre label puts up this impenetrable wall largely through the reputation of its major authors (Tolkien, Asimov  Rowling etc.) that stops potential readers from discovering them. I think that’s more a problem within the genre – it can be quite stifling, but then it can also win you legions of fans. So genre is both a blessing and a curse in that respect.”

December 2008, Macmillan New Writers blog:
“My life hasn’t changed that much – not in a world breaking-way. I still have a day job, I’m not stopped in the streets or mobbed by fans. And you know, I’m happy about that. I just want to get on with the writing, and that hasn’t changed either – my writing-energy feels boundless. I suppose the ‘little things’ have changed, for example the money I’ve got from rights and royalties have cleared a few household debts so we’re quite comfortable at the moment. It also means I can go part time (which I will be doing in January) to concentrate on the writing. So I suppose if anything has changed, my writing has become more serious because there is a bit of cash rolling in from it.

Oh, and I’ve fallen in with an amazing group of authors who have been a guidance and an inspiration. You might know them…” – Read More

March 2007, The Daily Telegraph 
“Queenstown was part of my New Zealand travels several years ago. Even in a country of awe inspiring scenery, Queenstown is an oasis of utter beauty, and lunacy: you can maim yourself in every conceivable way by participating in dangerous sports. But the “Adventure Capital of the World” tag shouldn’t put off the less adventurous – Queenstown is a great place to relax if you don’t fancy throwing yourself off a nearby mountain with elastic tied to your feet.”

January 2007, Profile Magazine 
“I was 12 years old when I started writing short stories. They were horror stories to freak out my parents and freak out my teachers – they said I read far too much Stephen King, that I should read the classics and write some pleasant stories – but where’s the fun in that?”

January 2007, The Sheffield Star
“Tomorrow evening Matt is launching the Secret War with readings and “copious amounts of alcohol” at Waterstones in Orchard Square but it may not be quite as riotous as his launch party last week. He and a group of friends went to his local restaurant, Cipolla in Broomhill, to eat and drink to the book’s success – and he got quite a surprise when they took off their jackets to reveal t-shirts promoting the book…”