When not training in extreme sport activities, Michael Collins writes novels - and wins coveted awards for them. He stops sprinting long enough to describe his latest novel, The Resurrectionists, writes Helen Meany

Michael Collins represents an emerging species. "How much sleep do we need," he shrugs, and of course he has a point. Why would you want to sleep when you could be running around Antarctica, sprinting in minus 30 degrees Celsius with ice embedded on your face? Or jogging up Everest perhaps. Pitting himself against the elements in inaccessible places and winning international contests for "extreme athletes" is what this 37-year-old US-based Irishman does for fun.

When he's not training in the forest wilderness behind Seattle, Collins is writing novels - or sometimes doing both simultaneously, with the help of a dictaphone. In between he devises computer programmes and installs telecommunications systems in remote Chinese villages, with his baby daughter in tow.

Until recently he hadn't bothered to mention his novel-writing to his former colleagues in Microsoft, where he worked until last summer. It was a private matter; after all, he was published in London rather than the US, where his work has had a tepid reception. But winning the Kerry Ingredients Award for Best Irish Novel two years ago for The Keepers Of Truth and being shortlisted for the Booker prize has changed things somewhat. Now the novel is on this year's shortlist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, to be presented next month.

Although the author's nationality qualified The Keepers Of Truth for the Kerry Irish novel award, it is unquestionably an American novel, set in the rust belt of the mid-west in the early 1980s. A gothic murder mystery - dismembered heads and all - it's a portrait of a post-industrial landscape and society, seen through the eyes of Bill, a young newspaper reporter enduring a scorching summer in a very small town. On the brink of emotional collapse, he's a classic unreliable narrator, whose lurid imagination is matched by the unfolding events. As he becomes entangled with the murder suspect and his ex-wife, Bill spills out his black thoughts in edgy streams of consciousness. Furious rhetorical flourishes attempt to bridge the gap between his aspirations and his talent.

Collins has now followed this with The Resurrectionists, a quest novel with a murder mystery at its heart, set partly on the road before settling into the fringes of Michigan, "so far north winter's breath holds life in abeyance for nearly eight months of the year". The novel begins as the hard-boiled narrator, Frank, abandons New Jersey for his home town up north when he hears that his uncle, who raised him, has been murdered. Gambling on the prospect of some share in his uncle's inheritance, he takes with him his violent partner Honey, their son, and her son by her first marriage, on a trip that involves stolen cars and cash seized at gunpoint. Frank's mordant commentary casts this as an existential journey towards his past self.

On arrival in Copper, Michigan, "the world capital of nowhere", it's clear that nothing is what it seems, that Frank's 1950s childhood is shrouded in lies and repressed memories. Each of the characters is "stuck in the eternal re-run of the past", from Honey, who awaits the death of her first husband on Death Row, to the murder suspect, who's in a coma in the local hospital, and the local psychiatrist who treated Frank as a child after the death of his parents in a house fire.

A more layered and technically accomplished novel than The Keepers of Truth, The Resurrectionists shares its noir-ish tone, its dense plotting and anthropological eye for detail. Collins is a connoisseur of the ephemera of American life, of slogans and jingles, of fast-food joints, merchandising and motels. His narrators' voices are forged from lines worn on T-shirts and displayed on the rear-windows of cars. "I find myself wondering what kind of person defines himself by these epigrams," he says.

His cultural influences come from TV and film rather than literature. As he creates a series of set pieces - graphic scenes carefully established and framed - his method is consciously cinematic. Not surprisingly The Resurrectionists has already been optioned for a film adaptation.

Having written a couple of collections of stories about Ireland in the early 1990s, the first of which was self-published, Collins realised that he needed to find a way of writing about the US, where he has lived since the mid-1980s. He first went there on a sports scholarship, having run competitively as a schoolboy in south Dublin. His time spent on the US racing circuit, living in campgrounds without a working visa, formed the background for his picaresque novel of the Irish illegal immigrant experience, Emerald Underground.

Extensive studies in computer programming led to work in Chicago, a city which fascinated him but which he eventually abandoned for the green spaces of Seattle and the self-contained world of the Microsoft campus. There he used to work 20-hour days that began at 4 a.m., broken by runs through woods where encounters with bears and lions were a regular hazard.

On his solitary forays, he would invent scenes, stories and dialogue, which he would write up back at his desk. Another few hours of work would follow, all in a vast windowless capsule flooded with permanent artificial light.

"Going home becomes ridiculous when you're in this environment full of life, movement and people, and it's light all the time," he says. "Humans are changing to adapt to this, sleep becomes unnecessary, and you can pursue your own interests, alone in public."

He keeps abreast of literary trends by scanning reviews, sampling a new writer's style, but rarely reading a novel from beginning to end. "There aren't many books on my shelves. I'm more interested in observing the ideas that are packaged in popular culture."

One literary connection that he's happy to make is with Steinbeck, whose narratives of 1930s America could have been written as non-fiction but who chose to capture the texture of individual experience in fictional form. Collins, too, has a mission as a social commentator, and views his two latest novels as part of a trilogy of American social history: The Keepers of Truth examining the decline of small-town America in the wake of heavy industry, The Resurrectionists exploring the legacy of the paranoia of the Cold War period. The third will focus on the information age and the technological revolution.

"I want to show the level of desperation that exists among people in rural areas especially," he says, "where the American dream is sold. The whole capitalist project is simply not working for this sub-group.

"These are the people who have been left behind, who are told that they need to keep trying to better themselves, and they have nothing."

Both novels use the gothic genre to depict the frustration and tensions that accompany poverty and hopelessness. "This is where the murders fit in," Collins says, "and the violence. People sublimate failure into violence or weird sex. Or they get trapped into forms of religiosity. And their big fear is to be associated with the poverty of the blacks.

"In Europe, people would channel this hopelessness into political action, they'd examine the reasons why they're so screwed up, but in America it's privatised somehow. Looking at the history of America, you could say that some of its weirdness comes from its origins: the puritans who went out there were extremists, and so many others who emigrated were desperate. It's a place built on myths that have been abandoned by Europe - the rags to riches myth, the evil empire myth, the fear of the Other - these are alive in America."

He observes the emigrant vision now taking another form: the "migration of American intellect" across the continent, from the East coast to Chicago to Seattle. People are still looking for an Eden, he says. The flight from heavy industry and from urban violence has taken highly educated people to Seattle in a form of "intellectual Darwinism".

'Now, with software and the possibilities of genetic alteration, the emigrant vision can continue into space," he says, and this theme of human perfectibility is the basis of his next novel. "There's the possibility of building space stations run by strong individuals - say, religious fanatics - who will choose who to take on board. This is the next stage of evolution, a radical transformation that has political and social ramifications.

"I'm exploring the possibilities of creating new worlds - and new kinds of human beings - through technology." In the meantime, he's working with the more vulnerable technology of the human body, training for the Olympic Triathlon, with his sights on the Irish team. As with literary prizes, he wears it all very lightly. Competitive? No, no - but then, it's easy to say that when you always win.

The Keepers of Truth is published by Phoenix (€11.30). The Resurrectionists is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson (£12.99 sterling). The winner of the International IMPAC Literary Award will be announced in Dublin on May 13th