Writing is a bit like being a car mechanic, Booker Prize-nominated New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones tells Shane Hegarty.

IT'S A rainy day in Dublin, but Lloyd Jones is enjoying his brief visit. He's been to the National Gallery; and when we meet he is browsing the shelves at the Book of Kells souvenir shop in Trinity College. "I thought Dublin would be like the English cities, but it's not. It has a character of its own."

It is Jones's first visit to Ireland, and one which will also take the New Zealander to the Listowel Writers' Week. We are meeting partly to talk about The Book of Fame, a fictionalised version of the first All Blacks' rugby tour to Britain and Ireland in 1905, in which a group of men travelled to the other side of the world, were hailed in the northern hemisphere and welcomed with great pride by their countrymen.

In reality, he is here because of Mister Pip, his Man Booker-shortlisted novel which has been hailed in the northern hemisphere and been treated with great pride by his countrymen.

"It's a lovely experience. I can talk endlessly about The Book of Famebecause it's my favourite. This is one of the really terrific things that has come out of being shortlisted for the Booker. Mister Piphas found lots of readers, but it's wonderful that this particular book will be read in the northern hemisphere, because it's so difficult to have a proper conversation with the rest of the world from a small country.

"It's all one way. And this is a piece of mythology that we would like the northern hemisphere to know about."

Or, given that The Book of Famewas written some seven years ago, and only now published here, he puts it a little more succinctly: "No one would have given a bugger about the backlist if Mister Piphadn't raised its head over the ramparts."

Quiet spoken and friendly, yet passionate in an understated way, Jones deploys the word 'bugger' in the gentlest manner possible. He is clearly enjoying his moment in the sun, even if he already has several bestselling and prize-winning novels under his belt. It's just that they were bestselling and prize-winning in a small country, very far away.

"I don't want to sound like I have a chip on the shoulder when one cites that reason, but it is part of the problem. For example, when The Book of Famecame out in New Zealand, my publisher in Australia said: 'I don't think we'll publish this book because it's indigenous'.

"And that's Australia, right next door for God's sake."

The Book of Fameis a story of how ordinary men became an extraordinary team, and impacted hugely on a sport and a nation. It has come to have certain parallels with his own career. When short-listed for the Booker Prize, Jones became a focus of his home country's wish to be acknowledged and acclaimed. Jones says that he genuinely felt no disappointment when Anne Enright's The Gatheringwas named as the winner, but from the other side of the world, he sensed the wilting pride of his compatriots.

"They wanted it so badly. Because there are so few things on the world stage through which we make our mark. And while I was touched by that craving, it was a little bit of a millstone," he says. "When I left the dinner, I did six interviews with New Zealand broadcasters. Two live television feeds. They stopped national radio to go live to the Booker announcement. And then I had to go on national radio in the morning, and, oh dear, oh dear, you could just sense the disappointment. It was palpable, even over 12,000 miles away."

For him, being overlooked for the prize itself caused little damage. The shortlisting had already boosted sales, and led to global interest in the book. Even during the writing of the novel - in which a British man reads Great Expectationsto a group of children on a Pacific island in the midst of a civil war - he knew he had created "something different and something new".

"And I'm always trying to do that anyway. I'm trying to reinvent the way a story is told. But with the language, and bringing together the oral tradition of storytelling with the written tradition, I was aware that this thing was flying in a way that other more traditional narratives don't. I had a sense of that."

The exoticism of the setting, and the innocence of the young islanders, is gradually suffocated by the encroaching war, and a book that is written from the point of view of a young girl takes the reader towards a dark conclusion. Was this a difficult decision for him?

"No. Mainly because the writer has a more clinical relationship with what he or she is describing. The reader is the one who provides the emotion really. And I don't think about the reader. I only think about what I need to read, so I suppose I'm responding to the reader in me," he says.

"It's a curious detachment you feel when you're writing these things. Writers and readers have different relationship with these things. Everyone says that a book is a collaborative experience between the writer and the reader, and I fully agree with that. The reader invests their emotions and the circumstance of their own life are all projected onto the text, whereas the writer is kind of just providing them with the thing to respond to.

"I have a feeling that for writers, it's a bit like being a car mechanic. You've got your head under the hood all the time, you can't see the damn car. The owner sees the car in its entirety. That really explains the different relationship between reader and writer to the text." He pauses. "This is a way of avoiding saying I'm a cold-blooded bastard."

Its success has impacted on his time, and therefore his writing. "It's very hard to get continuity. And novels take a lot of time and routine. They demand routine. You have to be in the same place at the same time every day. They don't happen by accident, so it's very hard to get that continuity. It would be even harder for Anne, I would imagine, if not impossible, to write anything decent for a year or so."

However, Jones insists that he feels no pressure over a follow-up. "If I was 32, that might be a pressure to be reckoned with, but I'm 53 and I don't feel that pressure at all because I am my own hardest critic and, you know, I'm always looking for that imaginative risk. I simply wouldn't publish something that's not good enough."

What is he writing now? "Can't tell you. Not to be precious about it, but I don't want to talk something out of existence and I've done that before. And it's quite exploratory at the moment anyway. It's like a journey, you know the departure point but you're not quite sure where you're going to arrive.

"There will be a few hidden reefs along the way for sure."