Nicola Barker lives and works in east London. She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Love Your Enemies, her first collection of stories. Her second story collection, Heading Inland, received the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her novel Wide Open won the IMPAC Prize in 2000, and Clear was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004. Her novel Darkmans was shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize. She is one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.

Mark Thwaite: What gave you the idea for Darkmans?

Nicola Barker: I was lying in bed with my partner, Ben Thompson, who was writing a book about British Comedy at the time (although not literally at the time). As part of his research he was idly paging through an old volume he'd picked up in a second-hand shop called Tales of the Jesters. He reached a section about this famous English jester John Scoggin (or Scogin) and started reading bits of it out loud. Scoggin was a highly educated man - he went to Oxford - but also a complete maniac. He was critical in the development of British comedy, because before Scoggin fools had been stupid whereas Scoggin merely pretended to be. He was jester to the Sun King - Edward IV. As soon as Ben started reading to me about Scoggin's various baroque misadventures I immediately said, 'I like the sound of this Scoggin. I'm going to use him to haunt a book.'

MT: How long did it take you to write it?

NB: Darkmans took around five years to write. I started it, and then interrupted myself to write Clear, a shorter novel about David Blaine. Clear was very topical and I had to turn it around in a matter of months. I often interrupt big novels in this way. I wrote Five Miles from Outer Hope half way through Behindlings. And I'm currently writing a golfing novella after starting another, slightly bigger book called In The Approaches, about genes and heredity.

MT: What does it mean to you to be longlisted [or shortlisted if that happens!] for the Booker prize?

NB: I've been longlisted for the prize before, and I was delighted then. It's even better to be shortlisted. Being shortlisted for - or winning - a prize is one of the few ways that literary writers can get mainstream media attention, and I suppose the Booker is the daddy of all prizes (although the IMPAC is pretty huge and especially fantastic because the books for the IMPAC are nominated by librarians from all over the world - the novel has to be in translation to be eligible. I was selected by a group of librarians in Oslo, which still makes me really proud).

MT: Do you read the critics Nicola? Have you been pleased with the response to your work? Have you learned anything from it or changed the way you write?

NB: I never read the critics. My partner, Ben, is a critic, and so he reads my reviews for me and tells me about them. I'm far too sensitive to read things myself. Although this can sometimes be counter-productive, because if you've been told you've got a bad review and you don't really know what the specifics are, the things you imagine can be hellish. But I prefer to be my own worst critic and try not to have my head turned by the good or the bad things other people say.

MT: Your book has a kind of encyclopeadic social range, is a sort of modern Middlemarch. Is realism an important aspect of your novel in particular and the novel in general?

NB: I've always integrated fantasy with realism, although my first truly 'realist' novel was Clear. I felt compelled to write it because I believed something fascinating was happening in Britain, culturally, which nobody else seemed eager to talk about. I was an evangelist of sorts with that book. I do feel that when an author uses real facts and information in a book it's important that they are all totally accurate. Nothing that I described Blaine doing (or having done) in that book was made up. Only the opinions and activities of the characters were fictional.

My mother is a teacher and I suppose a part of me longs to impart wisdom (however spurious that wisdom may be). When I discover a fascinating fact I always want to share it with the reader. I take a ridiculous amount of pleasure/pride in weird facts. They always seem so much more interesting to me than imagined things. What I like to do is to invent an imaginary world and then decorate it with beautiful, sometimes shocking little truths.

MT: What were the biggest challenges in writing Darkmans? How did you overcome them?

NB: I have a terrible memory - when I was a baby I contracted pneumonia, began fitting and stopped breathing for quite a while. I often think entire swaithes of grey matter were destroyed during that time (I have absolutely no sense of direction, for example). This means that I really struggle to retain information for lengthy periods. So when I write a big book which is structurally complex (as they usually are) I have to read and re-read the text to reacquaint myself with the narrative, the mood and the various ideas that I'm working on. It's a fairly laborious process and means that I rarely get a day off. If I'm working on a novel then I need to keep the whole thing in my head. I make endless revisions in my mind. I plan dialogue as I lie in bed, plot twists at the cinema or while I brush my teeth. By the end of the process I'm generally quite exhausted. But I'm a total perfectionist and everything needs to fit together and to form a complete whole or else I don't feel I've fulfilled my creative brief.

MT: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

NB: I write on a laptop. When I started out as a writer I wrote longhand, then I graduated onto an old Amstrad computer that a friend gave me. I loved the luminous green letters on the Amstrad. When the Amstrad died and I had to move on to a normal laptop I was extremely sad about it. The Amstrad was my perfect writing tool.

As I've already mentioned, I re-write endlessly. I am a perfectionist. My shorter books are, by and large, written much more quickly, though. When I write in the first person I don't revise nearly so much. Once I fully gauge the rhythm of the speech of my lead protagonist and understand his/her character and agenda, then I'm off and away.

Although I live with a writer and we sometimes talk about the processes of writing I don't often discuss the work I'm doing in any detail, and I rarely discuss it with anybody else, either. I find that discussing work undermines its mystery and its magic. The dialogue I have with the book is an intimate thing. Once a book has been read by other people I automatically begin to let it go. I just stop thinking about it and move on to something else.

MT: What do you do when you are not writing?

NB: When I'm not writing I can read fiction. I can't read it while I'm working. So I read a lot. I am currently obsessed by Thomas Mann. In the gap after Darkmans I read The Magic Mountain and it blew me away. I watch a huge amount of TV. I love reality TV. I'm fascinated by people, and the ways they present/re-invent themselves. Other things I do? I collect stuff - crucifixes, taxidermy, African art. I'm obsessed by Robert Crumb. I go to a lot of gigs. I'll never miss Euros Childs playing live, or The Bonnie Prince. I also love R&B.

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

NB: Nope. I'm my own ideal reader because I write, entirely selfishly (I'm afraid), to entertain myself. But I'm also my own harshest critic. That said, I do have readers who I love. I don't get many letters, but when I do they are generally from extremely special individuals. I received a letter a short while ago from a man in South Africa, a poet, who said 'your books show the greatest faith in The Friend I have ever seen.' That really delighted me. And Darkmans is dedicated to an American reader who filled out a comment card in a bookshop. He said some really lovely things about Behindlings. He was my perfect reader for that book and I felt I really wanted to repay his generosity of spirit by offering him something tangible back.

MT: What are you working on now?

NB: Right now I'm working on a golfing novella called The Yips. It's about golf and palmistry and a mess of other stuff. It's definitely at the lighter end of my repertoire. I taught myself to read palms for it, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

NB: My favourite writers change all the time. But I love Mann. I read Tristan and thought it was the most beautiful story I had ever come across. I couldn't recommend Mann highly enough. I love reading about Africa (because I grew up there), and few people can beat Kapuscinski on that particular subject. When he died recently I felt curiously bereft, as if a pair of eyes inside my own head had closed for good. In the break I had after Darkmans I read some Stefan Zweig - Beware of Pity. My skin still crawls when I think about that book. It was just horrifying. And I must recommend the South African doctor/writer Jonathan Kaplan's Contact Wounds which describes Kaplan's life as a doctor in some of the world's most chaotic and terrifying places. He has a brilliant heart and an astonishing talent. I see Kaplan as Kapuscinski's natural heir (although that's quite a bold claim to make). And then there's all the usual suspects - Kafka, who I've loved since my childhood - Dickens (Bleak House is my favourite), the poetry of Plath and Hughes and TS Elliot, Salinger, Martin Amis, Angela Carter.

MT: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

NB: Have an agenda. Why write a book unless you have something significant to impart? And don't simply describe your life and your prejudices (unless it - or they - are spectacular in some way), challenge yourself. Confound yourself. Learn something. Don't just write about what you know. Write about what you don't know. Make the process a revelation to both yourself and the reader.