What was the critical reception? Was it immediately picked up?

A Good Man in Africa did really well when it came out because it was published in January when the literary scene is dead. So suddenly here was this comedy set in Africa and very unusually for a first novelist I got solus reviews in national broadsheets, I had a single review in the Sunday Times, for example, which was unheard of. The book made quite a splash and got good reviews and started to sell. It was reprinted several times and I won a prize. It really was a kind of dream beginning for me. It was a bit of shrewd publishing, bring it out at the quietest time of the year and it'll get some notice whereas if I'd been published in September or in May, perhaps, I would have been lost in the mass of other books that were appearing.

You were an academic at the time. Did you give that up immediately?

I was living in Oxford and I was a college lecturer at St Hilda's College. I was trying to finish my PhD Thesis and trying to write novels and teaching, but I had really no idea whether I could make a living as a novelist. Even though I had this amazing start of two books out in one year, I stayed on at Oxford as an academic, as a college lecturer for another 3 years and I published my second novel An Ice Cream War when I was at Oxford and I wrote my first film while I was at Oxford and so it wasn't until 1983, in fact, that I realised that my slave wages as an academic were now being outstripped by my slightly more munificent earnings as a novelist, and I abandoned academic life and moved to London.

It sounds as if you kept the two lives running together. Did you find that one got in the way of the other?

Being a teacher or an academic can get in the way of being a novelist, because you're constantly aware of, as it were, the critic looming over your shoulder, analysing what you're doing. But I've always been able to compartmentalise my mental activities so I would go into college and teach TS Eliot and Yeats and then I would come home in the afternoon and write An Ice Cream War. But I wasn't temperamentally suited to being either an academic or a scholar - I never finished my PhD Thesis. I always wanted to be a novelist and my academic career was a safety net because I didn't know how I would get on and I had to have a way of earning a living. If my writing career hadn't taken off I'd probably still be in a university somewhere teaching Eng Lit!

Were the writers that were the subject of your teaching an influence on your writing?

I was teaching all sorts of odd things because as a junior don you get all the subjects that the senior dons don't want to teach. I was teaching my special period which was English Romantic Poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, but I was also teaching a lot of 20th century literature, a lot of poetry, TS Eliot, Yeats, as I've said, and a paper called Practical Criticism which they do at Oxford which is how to strip, take apart a piece of text and analyse it's various components. I taught the American Novel paper that sort of thing, but my tastes were already pretty formed I think and I wasn't looking to teach people I liked. Occasionally somebody would say to me could I write an essay on Philip Larkin or could I write an essay on Graham Greene and I'd think great I know a bit about that, but I was really just a jobbing college lecturer doing whatever bit of teaching came my way.

Which writers have influenced your work?

Well I think the writers that influence you are the writers you re-read, I think that's a very simple way of putting it. I've taught English Literature, studied and taught English Literature for 12 years and so in Universities, and so I've read my way through the canon pretty much, but the people I re-read are the ones I regard as my influences in that they chime with my tastes. I find that I re-read Evelyn Waugh I re-read Charles Dickens, I re-read a lot of American writers, John Updike, Philip Roth and I also read and re-read a lot of Russian writers which I can't really explain why. Nabokov is a great favourite of mine, so is Gogol, so is Chekov, these are people I go back to from time to time and so I think they've shaped my tastes and therefore have influenced me, but the influence is not a conscious one. I'm not thinking 'oh I must write in a Chekovian way' or 'I must write like John Updike' it's just that, what you like inevitably comes out in what you write.

You seem British in one sence, but there is also something very un-British in your work...

Well, the fact that I was born and raised in West Africa has had a huge impact on the kind of person I am. My childhood was an African childhood in Ghana and then in Nigeria, and although I was going, from the age of nine I went, was sent back to Britain, to Scotland, to go to boarding school. I regarded my home until my early twenties as being in West Africa in Nigeria. I felt more at home, bizarrely, in the big sprawling city of Ibiden in Western Nigeria than I did in Edinburgh or London. I knew how Ibiden worked and I didn't quite know how Edinburgh or London worked, so I think what this has done, and I'm rather reluctant to over-analyse it, but I think this has made me feel something of an outsider in my country. I'm British but because my upbringing was so exotic and I didn't actually live in this country until I went to university I've always felt slightly apart from the place, my relatives and contemporaries and so on, because of this curious and, you know, quite beguiling childhood and youth that I had.

I suspect that's made me look at Britain, or look at other countries, from the point of view of someone who is in a way derascinated. I'll put it another way, I feel at home wherever I'm happy. I've lived in various places in France and in New York and in Scotland and in Oxford and London and I've enjoyed living in these places, but if somebody said, you know, where would you like to be buried, which in a way is the kind of ultimate question as to, you know where do you think you come from you know I wouldn't say, Akimota in Ghana and I wouldn't say Ibiden in Nigeria and I wouldn't say Fife or Oxford or London. I don't really have a sense of you know where I'm from. If somebody said what is your nationality I would say, unreflectingly, I'm Scottish as both my parents are from the East coast of Scotland, but a lot of Scottish critics might argue that I'm not a Scottish novelist. I'm manifestly not a Nigerian or a Ghanaian, but my head is teeming with memories and images of my life in Africa, and in a way they're more present and more important than images that I've gathered from my life in university or Oxford or London. I think those memories you have when you are unselfconscious when you don't think 'I am a writer' are the ones that stay with you. So all this curious mix goes into making me the kind of person I am. How it pans out and affects my writing I'm not sure.

Does it make me more receptive to other literatures or other points of view, perhaps it's something like that, but I think it's more the sense that I've always felt slightly on the outside looking in. Graham Greene says that a novelist always has to have a chip of ice in his heart which I think is possibly the same sort of thing. If you feel slightly apart, if you're always something of the observer, it probably helps your writing and because of my upbringing that was almost a given with me.

You are interested in other art forms - painting, music - and this seems to me to give your work more of an international outlook than some of your contemporaries. Are you conscious of that?

Yes. I'm very interested in films, for example. I've written films, I've directed a feature film. I originally wanted to be a painter. When I was at school, I wanted to be an artist, not a writer, and that was quashed pretty heavily by the parental hand. I had an interest in painting and art before I started to think of myself as a writer.

I think my cultural taste is as wide as anybody else's in the sense that I like listening to music of all sorts, but my feeling is that I don't want to remain in the large pond of the literary world. Many of my friends are actors, film directors, producers or have nothing to do with writing - they run restaurants or are unconnected with the world I inhabit professionally.

I think this is all to the good and I sort of encourage myself to have different circles to move in. One of the attractions to me about the film business is that having spent three or four years writing a novel there's nothing nicer as far as I'm concerned than to suddenly have colleagues and collaborate and go to a film set. I really enjoy that, then after a while I begin to think oh I'd like to get back to my study again. A lot of my contemporaries who seem to me to only inhabit the one world are missing out on something I think. Deliberately, I always wanted from the beginning of my writing career to get into the movie business in one way or another, and I did fairly quickly, I wrote my first film a year after I'd published my first book and I loved it, but I love it I think because it just expands and broadens and widens my horizons.

Any Human Heart is the closest of all your books to The New Confessions. Do you see differences between the two books?

I think Any Human Heart does share a lot with The New Confessions initially. It covers a big time span, it's one man's life, but then the differences begin to make themselves apparent.

The biggest difference is in the way the story is told. In The New Confessions the hero, John James Todd, is at the end of his life and is looking back at the life he's lived and trying to make sense of it. Well, that whole process is something we can all do with our individual stories and say gosh if I hadn't gone to university I wouldn't have met so-and-so, or if I hadn't applied for that job, or if I hadn't gone on holiday and broken my leg, you can see when you look back all the various paths, the forking paths you took, and you can also lie and self-justify and apologise. The huge difference about the life story in Any Human Heart is that the man who is telling you the story is telling it to you day by day. It's in the form of an intimate journal and it starts when he's 17 and ends when he's in his 80's. So he doesn't know what's going to happen to him and as a story telling situation it's a massively different effect. If you think of your own life, you know, here I am today. I don't know what's going to happen this afternoon. I have an idea that I'm going to have supper tonight and you just don't know. But if I have to tell you what happened yesterday I can give you a complete account of it and I can shape it in such a way to make me seem nicer or more decent or braver or whatever.

So the relating of a life day by day as it unfolds week by week month by month year by year, is an entirely different thing. That's what made me want to write about a life in that way because it's the way we live and you read about this life that's being presented to you, by a man called Logan Mount Stewart who's a writer. I vowed I'd never write a book about a writer but here I am, I've done it. He meets a girl, he is smitten by her, how is it going to turn out? He doesn't know. We don't know. He publishes a book - it's a huge success. Is his life going to be transformed or not? So as his life unfolds and as you begin to, you the reader can look back and see what's gone wrong what mistakes he's made, he shouldn't have done that, why wasn't that successful? how did that fail? We begin to understand him in a way that I think we sort of understand ourselves.

Do you think the reader will have a liking of him too? Or do you think that's irrelevant?

Any Human Heart is an attempt to get the being human business down in a novel but without apparent hindsight or manipulation but of course I know exactly what's happening to him. In the novel, you know, you can deal very easily with flawed characters. I mean, we're all flawed we're not perfect, we're not saints, Logan Mount Stewart is not a saint, he behaves very badly, he's very self-regarding sometimes, sometimes he behaves well. I didn't want to make him a nice guy particularly, I wanted to make him a human being, somebody who's tempted and who succumbs, somebody who sometimes holds back and behaves well etc. etc. In a way the question of do you like him or don't you like him is irrelevant. I think at the end of the book when he's an old man and you see what a hellish time he's had there's a kind of respect for him. I feel that in a way as human beings if we get through to the end relatively intact, there are no winners, as Logan Mount Stewart says, everybody's going to lose this race, but there's a sense that perhaps attaches to the Socrates epigraph that life has been gripped with both hands and lived to the full. I think that is the feeling you have at the end of it.

It's very odd this relationship with characters. Some people find Hope Clearwater at Brazzaville Beach very cold and unfeeling. I don't see that but that's every individual reader's response to a character. There's nothing the author can really do to influence that if you're serious about it, if you're painting a fully rounded three-dimensional character. As Logan's fortunes decline you begin to like him more he becomes quite a feisty old man, and he knows tremendous success early in his life and then it becomes a long, slow slide to poverty and obscurity. But his spirit never wilts. He's very unlucky, he has terrible bad luck in his life as well as some good luck, and my own take on life is that it is a question or an aggregate of all the good luck you have and all the bad luck you have and some people have more good luck than others, there's nothing you can do about it. If you have that kind of view of the human condition it's quite stoical and quite strengthening in a way and I think Logan who is buffeted in a way more than any of us would like to be by life's unfairness and tragedies, comes through at the end. I think you sort of respect and acknowledge him and you may like the old so-and-so as well.

On the one hand the fact that real people are interwoven with the text gives it a modernist feel, and then the fact that the novel is written in a number of sections which gives it a stragely Victorian feel.

Well the structure of the novel was dictated by the fact that I wanted to write A Life from the age of, well he's born in 1907 and dies in 1991 he lives in every decade of the 20th century, and the challenge as a writer is not many novelists actually have to cover all that ground. Because I was writing it as a journal form you couldn't sort of say 'Chapter 6 - 15 years later', you had to deal with the life so that was a real challenge, a writerly challenge to do that. So I spent many months reading journals and one of my favourite journals is Boswell's Journals which cover a great swathe of his life in the 18th century. But Boswell's Journals are divided into The London Journal, Boswell On The Great Tour and The Corsican Journal, and it seemed to me that was the way to do it, that the life could be in segments and each segment had its own journal and I was therefore able to cover that huge amount of ground. Getting on to this idea of this kind of modernist playing with fiction and fact, this is something that I've done a lot in my writing life I now realise that I've been doing it for a long time. I'm a realistic novelist, I want readers to pick up my books and believe in the world of the book, to suspend their disbelief and to be seduced by the world I create, my fictional world I create. And there are all sorts of ways I can help this process along. I try to make it seem as believable and plausible and realistic and authentic as possible. But I recognise that over the last few years I've been pushing the boundaries as much as I possibly can.

The New Confessions is a form of fake autobiography, you're actually meant to believe that John James Todd lived and he does encounter real people and he lives through historical moments, and so forth, and so that's another way it seemed to me of making my imagined world more real was by making it a fake autobiography. Then I wrote a little book about a painter I invented called Nat Tate which was quite a famous hoax a few years ago. Well Nat Tate is a book presented as a biography with photographs and illustrations and acknowledgements and footnotes and everything else, and I now realise, though this wasn't really my intention, that Any Human Heart is in a way the third panel of this triptych that having done autobiography, biography, I'm now doing the intimate journal and I think this is the form of fiction if you like, that is the most bamboozling. It's presented to you as 'here are the intimate journals of a man, this man met Virginia Woolf, this man was involved in the Spanish Civil War, he met Ernest Hemmingway, he became an intimate of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor' but also it's full of fictional characters as well, and because he's living his life through the 20th century he's caught up in historical events or he ignores historical events, there's a massive attempt on my part to make this fiction seem absolutely real. And why do I do this? Is it something in the air?

You know, I think there is something in the air at the moment, you know life is so bizarre and so strange and so engrossing and terrifying that in a way fiction has to become even more like life in order to earn its place, in order to demand your attention. Many novelist start writing non-fiction in a way to get closer to the nitty gritty, whereas what I've tried to do, almost unconsciously there's no grand plan, but I look back now and see the different stages, what I've tried to do is to make fiction seem so real that that blurring line or that line between fact and fiction is so blurred that you forget about it. Maybe the feeling is that because I'm writing about a human being and his life you will think, you know, maybe Logan Mount Stewart did exist because it's all so incredibly plausible and it's all so incredibly documented. There's even an index at the back of this novel. So all these tricks and games are at the service of a genuine desire to make my novel seem incredibly real.

Could you recommend two novels for reading groups?

The two books I'd like to recommend come out of my current obsession with things Russian. I've been re-reading Chekov the last year or so and Chekov we think of as a playwright but in Russia he's actually revered as a writer of short stories. It's his fiction that gives him his huge reputation and standing. There's a wonderful selection of Chekov's stories, 20 of them or so, called the Chekov Omnibus which is edited by a man called Donald Rayfield, it's the old translation by Constance Garnet which he has corrected because she made lots of mistakes. These are the stories I've been reading and they're fantastic, they're amazing stories. To think that they were written at the end of the 19th century the beginning of the 20th - they're so much of the beginning of the 21st century as well.

The other novel I'd recommend is by another Russian, Vladimir Nabokov, not perhaps his most famous novel which was probably Lolita, which is wonderful, but a novel he wrote called Pale Fire. I think you can say that it is unique, nobody has ever written a novel like it and you'll probably never read a novel like it. It's fantastically funny, fantastically clever, and it just shows how generous the novel form is, you can do absolutely anything in it, and Pale Fire is perhaps pushing it as far as it can possibly go.