Adam, you've published both poetry and fiction, both very accomplished – when did writing begin for you, and was it always a case of pursuing both poetry and prose?
It began aged fifteen at school when a teacher suggested I write a poem for the school's poetry club. I then wrote nothing but poetry until I was an undergraduate and only started to write prose seriously when I got to UEA. Madame Bovary was a transitional book for me in this respect. It helped me finally to understand that prose works can be as rhythmical and controlled, as finished and precise as poems.

You read English at St Catherine's, Oxford, and studied under Craig Raine. Can you describe how this influenced your writing?
I was already in full spate as a young poet when I got to Oxford and it would be hard to identify any very specific influence it had on my work. It was simply the place where I was reading what I did and writing as best as I could. It was enabling in some more overt ways. I summoned the courage to speak to Les Murray (a poet I admire enormously and admired then almost religiously) after a reading he gave. He invited me to come and talk and show him some poems, a couple of which he published in the Australian literary magazine Quadrant. His seal of approval meant a great deal to me and helped preserve my confidence through the inevitable blizzard of rejection slips that lay ahead. Craig Raine's tuition was also extremely valuable. His editorial eye is forensically searching. No hint of cliché or sentimentality or inadequacy of thought is permitted to remain. I learnt a good deal about the discipline of writing from him, and about the value of the editorial process. He has also remained a friend and has published pieces of mine in his magazine Areté.

What prompted you to apply for the MA at UEA?
It was Craig Raine's suggestion. If you can get funding, he said, then it's a year to do nothing but write. Evidently true.

You came initially to do the Poetry strand?
I did. And I remained in it. My prose, my first very uneven short stories, I discussed in a small group of students who met outside of classes. I was very lucky: they were very talented people, as their subsequent careers have proved: Ben Rice, Panos Karnezis, Clare Allan, Clare Wigfall. I seem to have been in a particularly good year.

You did the course in 1999-2000. Can you describe how the teaching was structured then, and who taught you and what sort of things you were writing?
As I recall, one workshop a week and one seminar for your subsidiary course. I got a lot from my subsidiary courses: Peter Womack's on adaptation and a course on the history of madness in modern Britain with the history department. Andrew Motion taught the poetry workshop for the first term, Denise Riley for the second. They had very contrasting styles, both very helpful. Andrew's was urbane, literary, editorial, with a quiet passion and a sense of generous conversational invitation. Denise Riley's was more restless, more theoretical, more unsettling. I learned much from her integrity and her particular constellation of influences: surrealism, the New York poets, and so on.

How would you describe the experience of being on the course?
Good, overall. It helped to have a secure sense of what I was doing and wanted to achieve and to have the self-confidence that Les Murray, Craig Raine and others had instilled. I was aware that some people found the criticism that came in workshops hard to take. There were occasional tears and flouncings out. News of other people's success with agents and publishing deals also caused some panic in the coop. The important thing to remember, then as now, is that when it comes down to it there is only you and the English language. I remember the social life being a bit odd, perhaps inevitably: a group of writers is a group of people all of whom want to be quietly observing everyone else.

What happened next for you? There's quite a long gap between graduation and the publication of your first novel.
As I say, I'd only really just begun to write prose seriously at UEA so had a good deal more learning to do afterwards (and still do). I started a novel that came out of the travel I did with the Harper-Wood Fellowship, the year after UEA. That novel didn't work out and was abandoned. I then wrote a complete short novel that was too much the typical first novel that reheats adolescent experiences and that ended up shelved. Then I began The Truth About These Strange Times. Meanwhile I was working in shops and offices and searching for an agent.

The Truth About These Strange Times won a Betty Trask Award and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. How have you found the experience of being published and reviewed and winning prizes and so on, that public side of being a writer?
I had a long period, as your earlier question indicated, when I was writing alone and without any public exposure and that perhaps intensified the shock of the transition. I have not so far enjoyed the public side very much. It's nice to win prizes, of course, and to accrue the audience you hope they bring you, but it is a regrettable fact of life that praise is much less memorable than its counterpart. The sensation of being reviewed is one of helplessness and travesty. It's an impossible task really, to reduce a book to five hundred words and offer a perfectly just opinion. Good or bad, they get it wrong. As more stuff about you appears it's easy to waste time reading it and thinking about it, a very sterile activity that can leave you miserable and perplexed with self-consciousness. I'm going to try and give up reading reviews. There is a real loss of innocence that comes with familiarity with the publishing and PR machines. It can be dismaying and afterwards your sense of the art and of the integrity of the secret, private place from which you write can need repair.

A year on from the publication of your novel you've published a verse novella The Broken Word. Did the writing of these books overlap?
I wrote The Broken Word while sending out the completed manuscript of The Truth About These Strange Times to agents. That process took about eight months. The poem was written quickly and finished within that time.

How would you describe the relationship between your fiction and poetry now – do they complement each other, influence or interfere with each other…?
For me, they don't lie very far apart because they are both narrative, just with some (surprisingly few) differing technical resources. I don't write short form, first person, lyrical poetry any more. I'd be quite happy to but it just isn't coming my way at the moment. I certainly learned some technical things from writing The Broken Word that had to do with concision and how much it is possible to trust the reader to understand, which I tried to apply to the writing of my next novel. So far, then, they do not seem to be impeding each other – quite the opposite.

What will you be writing next?
I am just finishing a new novel which is different again to either of the first two books. It is historical, set in Epping Forest around 1840, and mixes real with imagined people and events. The principal real people are John Clare and Alfred Tennyson, both of whom were there, experiencing very different things, at that time.

Interview: June 2008