JO Morgan has published book-length poems on subjects as diverse as the 10th-century battle of Maldon and a future Martian returning to his abandoned mother planet, Earth. His book Assurances, about the RAF’s involvement in the cold war, won the 2018 Costa poetry award, while Interference Pattern (2016) was described in the TLS as “a poem that could come to be for the 21st century what The Waste Land was for the 20th”. Morgan’s latest book, Appliance, is a short novel told in 11 discrete chapters over a period of about 70 years, charting the advance of a new technology, teleportation, that arrives first as a fridge-like contraption and becomes, with each new version, more powerful and pervasive. Among other things the title, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Orwell prize, articulates beautifully current human anxieties about unregulated artificial intelligence. Morgan, 45, lives in a cottage on a farm in the Scottish borders.

What was the genesis of the book?
Stories stay in my mind over many years. A long time ago I had an idea for a book where the protagonist was this inanimate, unthinking thing and the people around it were a kind of Greek chorus. Then it was working out what sort of technology I wanted it to be. I didn’t want it to be a real technology, but I wanted it to be something [teleportation] that would be familiar to readers.

Why the shift from poetry to fiction?
I started off writing fiction – I had written about 10 works of fiction before my first book of poetry came out. I’ve just always been interested in suiting the form of telling to the story.

Where are those earlier books now?
Some are on a shelf, because I do book binding as well. Those two things were separate, my bookbinding and my writing of books, but then they came together in the fact that I could see a project through to its end.

Were you always ambitious for publication?
I’m writing because the stories are in my head and if I don’t do it, then that’s where they stay.

Do you write the kind of books that you like to read?
Certainly, with poetry, the type of poetry that most intrigues me is the longer form. I didn’t study English, so I come to literature just as a reader. I remember reading things like Beowulf in translation, and feeling this is a very different way of storytelling and being really intrigued by that.

Do you have luddite tendencies?
I have all sorts of technology around me, but I like older tech that I can control. My phone is an old BlackBerry Q10. This MacBook I’m using is from about 2011. If I was to get a new phone, I would be the one to go through every line of the agreement and the setup to make sure it was not doing things I didn’t want it to do. My worry is about accepting unregulated development. Just because most people are fine with it does not mean those people are correct.

What science did you study?
Mainly biological sciences, animal behavioural psychology, a bit of physics and chemistry. One thing you realise is how scientists match their theories with what they’ve observed, with statistical analysis, with experiment, but they don’t necessarily know exactly what’s happening.

You have been publishing with small presses and now you are with a mainstream publisher – how has that changed your sense of your writing?
Not so much. It was really nice with this book, for example, that they still allowed me to do all the typesetting. It’s just how I work. And they sent me some covers that a proper graphic designer had done, but I also just mocked up something myself. And a few days later, my editor said: “We love it. Can you do the cover?”

What did you read as a kid?
I was quite a slow reader. There was an aspect of dyslexia, though I’m a little bit uneasy about saying that because I think there is still this stigma of, ah, you’re a dyslexic author, therefore you’re not good with words. The way I see it is it means a carefulness; I take my time with reading. In terms of habits there was definitely a turning point where I was around 16 or 17 and I saw all these Penguin classics in a bookshop. Books I was aware of but had never read: Gulliver’s Travels, say. It became something like self-education after that.

Was this book written in lockdown?
No, before, in 2019. Since then, I’ve written quite a few more. I feel very awkward about putting things to publishers. I think I do books that may sound strange, but I don’t want them ever to feel strange to the reader. I don’t like to copy myself. I don’t like to copy other authors. I’ve always wanted to push somewhere else.

What is the book you return to most as a reader?
There are a few. In fact, just last night I finished rereading Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams – at 3am. It’s a short book. But it’s never about the length of the book. It’s the scope. Another that I’ve gone back to many times is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The writing is fantastic and makes you feel you have this complete understanding of this whole other world.

When people talk about virtual reality, it always seems to me you can’t really beat fiction for that?
I remember the director James Cameron with Avatar talking about creating immersive worlds, and thinking: what’s more immersive than a book? You’re putting these little black symbols on a page and it’s like the code for the reader to experience something they couldn’t experience in the real world. I play various instruments and of course music can create that immersive experience. But only in literature can it last over so long a period. There are poetry books I’ve read that are only 40 pages or so and it’s taken me a month to read them. I’m delighted with that.

• Appliance by JO Morgan is published in paperback by Vintage (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply