I was born the year the Troubles began, in 1968. That world of violence was all I knew - people murdered, maimed, kneecapped, bombed. I don't remember a time without a major atrocity of some kind every week.
Building on the work of George Macdonald, William Morris and Edward Plunkett, what became known as high fantasy was more or less invented by J. R. R. Tolkien.
I did a law degree but was miserable the whole time. I was supposed to join a law firm in London but instead went to Oxford to do a master's in philosophy.
I did the same thing as every Irish person who comes to New York. I arrived on a Wednesday, and by Saturday night, I was pulling pints at a pub in the Bronx.
I find it easier to write in the winter in Melbourne. When the weather is good you want to go out for a walk, ride a bike, go to a cafe or something. When it's raining, when it's a miserable day, I just sit down at my desk and get some work done.
I had gone to New York with no plan at all. I did a lot of jobs - barman, teacher, security guard, postman and construction worker - and I was meeting many eccentric characters, and they were saying funny things, which I always wrote down.
I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them.
I met my wife in Oxford, fell in love with her, and followed her to New York. I was an illegal there for the first few years, until we got married, so I ended up doing lots of interesting jobs, some for a few days, some for a few months.
I speak with a Northern Irish accent with a tinge of New York. My wife has a bit of a Boston accent; my oldest daughter talks with a Denver accent, and my youngest has a true blue Aussie accent. It's complicated.
I think the poetry that came out of Belfast, and especially the Queen's University set, in the 1970s and '80s - you know, Paul Muldoon and Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Ciaran Carson - that was probably the finest body of work since the Gaelic renaissance, up there with the work of Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory.
A specific editor in a specific place likes the book, and you're in. A different editor on a different day goes, 'Oh, this isn't for me', or doesn't even look at it, and that's it.
I've always been a secret locked-room fanatic. I read my first one when I was about ten or 11, Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express,' with David Niven and Peter Ustinov on the cover.
In the crime fiction section, you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from and speaks to you about your life - or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way.
On my Wikipedia page, it used to say I was born in Belfast, Ireland, then it said Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then it said Belfast, U.K. So there was a little war going on about where Belfast is located.
Our daughter's name Arwynn comes from Arwen in 'Lord of the Rings' because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another.
Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location.
The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked.
'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre.
The Ned Kelly is definitely the coolest of all the crime fiction awards, and if you think about it, it's the only one that's given for an entire continent.
With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.
