Novelist Jim Crace tells Gloria Lauri-Lucente that despite the detail he goes into when describing scenes of violence, he does not have a violent bone in his body.

Jim Crace is the author of a number of short stories, radio plays and novels. Among his best known works are the novels Continent (1986), The Gift of Stones (1989), Quarantine (1997), Being Dead (1999), and The Pesthouse (2007).

The narrative structures of my novels are most often built round a walk. To best enjoy my books you will need to put on sturdy boots

He has also worked with the BBC,writing educational programmes, andas a freelance journalist for The DailyTelegraph and other newspapers.

Crace is the recipient of several literary awards, among them the Whitbread Book Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.

How would a Twitter posting, all 140 characters of it, describe Jim Crace?

A good-humoured, lucky, working-class Englishman writing poetic, sombre novels that are un-English in nature and bourgeois in their appeal.

You have accustomed your readers to perceiving the familiar and the feared anew, and your writing is also very good at showing us the unglimpsed, or that which we had scarcely thought to see. Is this a deliberate strategy on your part?

First of all, I am not an introspective writer. So the only deliberate strategies I have concern the structure of sentences and the pitch of paragraphs. That’s the craft side of writing and while I am at work I am always conscious of its intricacies.

The rest – the inner life of a novel; the greater life of a novel; the “unglimpsed” that you mention – is something I leave to impulse and to the innate traditions of narrative which are part of human consciousness.

I proceed blindly, hoping for the help of the intuitive and for the natural generosity of storytelling. Maybe that’s why I find it hard to answer your question – because I don’t really understand what’s going on myself, and don’t want to.

For me writing is a strange mixture of control (the craft) and abandonment (letting the novel breathe freely despitemy best efforts to detain it). It’s like flying a kite: you control the strings but not the wind.

Talking about the unglimpsed, you often describe in fascinating detail scenes of violence that are normally left ‘offscreen’. Such moments of disturbing violence can also be poignantly lyrical. How important is the style of writing in achieving this mixture of violence, death and lyricism?

It worries me that this part of my writing is misunderstood. I have been abused at public readings on several occasions for “taking a childish delight in disgust” and “glorifying in cruelty”.

I am baffled by these responses and reject them. I know enough about myself, after 66 years in my own company, to claim that I do not have a violent bone in my body.

But nor, come to that, am I as easily “disgusted” as are some of my readers who seem only to want kingfishers, roses and rainbows in their “natural worlds”.

It’s true I don’t turn away from ugly scenes but not because I have a pessimistic view of the world. On the contrary, it is evidence of my deep and cheery optimism.

Any fool can find hope and joy in a sunny garden full of flowers, but only a compulsive optimist such as me willseek and find hope and joy in the planet’s darkest corners.

Many of my readers do not realise my intention is not to horrify them but to provide them with some hard-won comfort.

To what extent, if at all, did 9/11 influence you when writing the postapocalyptic novel The Pesthouse?

My relationship with the USA is on a roller-coaster: deep sympathy after 9/11, horrified disapproval of the war-mongering, great love of American culture, but despair at its global dominance.

This ambiguity was best summed up by a recent opinion poll in several Middle Eastern nations: asked which country they most despised, 87 per cent said the US; asked which country they would most like to emigrate to, 86 per cent gave the same answer.

The Pesthouse was my way of trying (and failing) to make sense of all this by stripping back the US to nothing but the land itself. Nevertheless, I am still excited enough by the States to be looking forward to living in Austin, Texas, for six months later this year.

My next question also has to do with The Pesthouse. How important is humour even in the portrayal of particularly bleak moments in your works?

In person, I’m a very jokey, happy-go-lucky man but my books pretend to a higher purpose. They are more interested in being beautiful and wise than being funny. At best, my novels are playful and mischievous but my readers won’t be laughing out loud. I regret that, but my natural writing voice is a sober one. If you want to be amused, don’t waste your euros on one of my books.

Would you be happy to be described as ‘a novelist of ideas’? What do we miss in your work when we describe you in these terms?

I can hardly complain about being called a novelist of ideas. There have been less tolerant judgements of my work. And it’s a just description. I have never started any of my novels with a clear plot, a decided set of characters, or a particular setting in mind. I let those things suggest themselves as I go along. But I have always got an idea that I want to explore – or at least a question that I want answering. How much do I love America, for example? How does an atheist deal with death? Is tender timidity more admirable than thoughtless courage?

The relation between landscape and memory is vital to your work, in which the naturalist’s imagination is also strongly discernible. Can you say more about that?

I guess this is the one autobiographical ingredient in my writing. I am not a religious person but I do take great solace from the natural world and from landscapes. For me, a walk is a kind of non-believer’s devotion and thanksgiving. Darwinism at prayer, perhaps.

Writing novels is an opportunity to invent my own godless landscapes. And as you will have noticed, the narrative structures of my novels are most often built round a walk. To best enjoy my books you’ll need to put on sturdy boots.

All That Follows is yet another departure for you – politics, music, the thriller genre combine in interesting ways there. Creatively, what was the attraction in what that novel represents?

All That Follows is my least successful book. I knew it would be, but didn’t care. I stepped away from my natural skills to write it. I was like a tenor singing baritone. I was thinking more of indulging myself rather than the reader. It is a novel about my politics and my choice in music, for example. Why should anyone else care about that? My forthcoming and final novel, Harvest (to be published in 2013), returns to landscape and the natural world. Get your boots out.

Do you have any words of advice for struggling writers?

Set your hurdles high. Be ambitious. Attempt the impossible. There are already too many excellent, unpublished novelists who haven’t taken enough risks. But don’t expect the heavens to open just because you’ve written a book.

The reading is being organised by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta in collaboration with the British Council. It will be held at the Aula Magna, Old University Building, St Paul Street, Valletta, on Thursday at 6.30 p.m. A limited number of books by Jim Crace, who will participate in a book-signing session, will be available at the venue. Entrance is free.

Gloria Lauri-Lucente is head of the Department of Italian and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta.