In town last week courtesy of the British Council was bestselling author and last year’s Booker Prize judge Louise Doughty. She was previously here in early 2005 to write a piece on the tsunami for the Guardian Newspaper of London. I caught up with her for an interview, one of the most instructive I’ve ever done, because in the course of it she managed to puncture many of the myths we Sri Lankan writers have formed for ourselves about how we ought to behave.

"I am of Romany stock (known to many as gypsies, though this is now considered a derogatory term. It was thought originally that we came from Egypt, though it has since been discovered we originated in India). There are 10 million of us – the fastest growing minority in Europe. It is interesting to note that at a time when Europeans are terribly concerned about how other nations in the world treat their minorities, 84% of Romanies in Europe live below the recognised poverty line.

"I was born in 1963 in Melton Mowbray, where the famous pork pies come from, where my grandfather was a baker in the industry; so I can still tell an original pork pie: the sides of it are hand-raised and should sag. Also the meat inside should be grey not pink."

Grey? I ask with horror.

"Grey!" she says with a smile. If it’s pink it’s a Yorkshire pie."

"I attended Leeds University in the 1980’s, the Thatcher Years. It was the time of the miner’s strike, poll tax unrest, the Yorkshire Ripper. There was a very real sense of the North-South divide in England. After that I did an MA in Creative Writing from East Anglia where Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter were my tutors. Ann Enright (the Booker winner before Aravind Adiga) was a contemporary and friend."

An all star cast, in other words!

"Back to London then, where I worked at a series of jobs: secretarial work, teaching, cleaning and bar work. I was never supported by my parents. And I will expect my children, in their turn, to make their own way in the world."

(In stark contrast to many of us here, fortunate to have parents beavering away behind scenes, keeping us in the style to which we’ve become accustomed.)

And were you writing during this time?

"I wrote two novels, neither of which has seen the light of day."

Why not?

"I would die rather than have them published! It is not enough to be able to write well. You have to have something worthwhile you want to say. In each of those manuscripts there’s probably one decent episode in three hundred pages!"

And then you wrote the big one, the one that rocketed you to fame, Crazy Paving.

"I remember meeting my agent to give him the first hundred pages of it. He said he’d get in touch once he’d read them. He called me while I was still at Charing Cross Station waiting for the train home. He said, ‘This is it, I’m photocopying this and sending it out to all the publishers right now.’

"Crazy Paving was loosely but vengefully based on my secretarial experiences! It went on to sell something in the region of 50,000 copies, I still don’t know the actual figures because publishers never tell you the truth!" (Ha! I thought to myself.) "This was in 1995, a good eight years after I began writing. And let me tell you, I needed each and every one of those years!"

Again, a lesson for us Sri Lankans who fondly imagine we can publish even our laundry list and get away with it. How long did it take you to write this book?

"About 18 months. That was before I had a family! The whole process took about two and a half years from start to finish, with about six re-writes. Mind you, the second book, Honeydew, took only seven months to write and was published a year after the first. It was a short book, 55,000 words, because it was based on a short idea. During this time I worked as theatre critic for the Mail on Sunday, a great job: only one column a week, the whole day free to write, and out at the theatre every evening!"

So you don’t see anything wrong with being a journalist while doing ‘serious writing’?

"On the contrary, in the West it is almost imperative to be a journalist, so that your public profile is raised: a writer who isn’t also a journalist would be considered quite odd!"

She smiles in disbelief when I tell her that many of us here are far too precious to get our hands dirty with mere journalism!

Tell me about the last Mann Booker Prize, the Oscars of the writing world. Give me the juice, dish me the dirt!

"Being a Booker judge is an absolutely exhausting process — it wipes out a whole year of your life — but worth every minute. The books start coming in January, though April 1^st is the deadline. We have to produce a long list by July. Last year we had 116 books to read in three months, roughly a book a day! By June you begin to worry that you’re losing your sense of judgment, that you can’t trust your feelings anymore."

Weren’t there any you could just sling aside because they didn’t have a hope in hell?

"The standard last year was frighteningly high, though in retrospect there may have been one or two . . . We produced a long list of 13 in July. We judges got on really well and there was a lot of agreement. We were also looked after really well. The banquet on the night for 600 people was incredible." (Louise wore a stunning metallic sheath dress which hit the front pages of every newspaper!)

"We awarded the prize to White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga, which has gone on to become one of the biggest selling Booker winners of all time. The judges were divided three to two, between this book and The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry. I still remember the press conference for the shortlist, with journalists from all over the world. There was a sharp intake of breath when Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress Of Florence didn’t make it to the short list!

"Subsequently I went on to put my foot right royally in it when the arts correspondent of the Independent interviewed ‘Why is it such a readable shortlist this year?’ she asked.

‘Because there are no poncy male academics among the judges this year!’ I answered.

"I have always been known for shooting my mouth off! Of course all hell broke loose. Novelist launches attack on male academics, the newspapers screamed. The famous philosopher A.C. Grayling wrote: ‘This woman is clearly unwell.’"

I end the interview by consoling her: Ashok Ferrey is equally well known for shooting his mouth off and getting into trouble with the stuffy establishment, so she’s in good company. Besides what would life be without a little scandal?

Ashok Ferry is the author of two books, Colpetty People, and The Good Little Ceylonese Girl.