Roger Keen

Roger Keen was born in London and attended art colleges in Plymouth and Bournemouth, studying fine art, photography and film. Since then he has worked extensively in television, contributing to many award-winning dramas and documentaries for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. His programmes have won Royal Television Society, Worldfest-Houston and other awards.

He began publishing fiction and non-fiction in the 1990s, specializing in noir short stories and articles and reviews concerning weird film and literature. He has a particular interest in the Surrealists, the Beat writers, cyberpunk and the psychedelic movement. His work has appeared in anthologies such as Out of the Shadows and magazines including the PsypressUK Journal, Critical Wave, Writer’s Monthly, Threads and The Third Alternative. He also contributes to websites such as Reality Sandwich, The Digital Fix, Infinity Plus and The Zone, and he writes booklet essays for Blu-ray releases of classic weird and psychedelic films.

In 2010 Roger published The Mad Artist: Psychonautic Adventures in the 1970s, a novelistic memoir concerning his pharmo-picaresque adventures as an art student. It is both an example of psychedelic ‘trip-lit’ and a piece of experimental ‘reality fiction’, exploring the interface between autobiography, fiction and metafiction. This was followed by the metacrime psychological thriller Literary Stalker, which takes these elements further in pure fictional form, involving self-begetting and nested narratives looping and fusing. Roger’s latest novel, The Empty Chair, moves the experimental journey into historiographic metafiction, holding up a skewed mirror to personal and cultural history, constantly shuffling the relationship between truth and invention.