Richard, a character in Michael Cunningham's latest novel, The Hours, bears a faint resemblance to the author himself. Like Cunningham, Richard is a gay New Yorker, middle-aged and a writer of powerful ability. And unlike other characters in the book, who spend much of their time worrying about the fleeting nature of life and human achievement, Richard is on the verge of winning an award that will forever fix his name among the notables of English-language literature.

"Lo and behold the power of suggestion," says Cunningham, letting loose the first of many guffaws of laughter during a recent interview at a Greenwich Village coffee shop. Five months have passed since Cunningham's novel, a triptych of interwoven tales inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, was awarded the 1999 Pulitzer prize for fiction, making the author the first openly gay man to win the award. But the wild ride goes on. Cunningham's book about reading, writing and the life well lived, now in its 11th US printing, has sold more than 135,000 copies, a film adaptation is in the works, and The Hours will soon appear in paperback in Ireland and the UK, published by Fourth Estate.

"When I first heard about the prize I was stunned; it just didn't seem possible," says Cunningham, more boyish and enthusiastic than his 47 years would suggest. Up against more typical Pulitzer fare like Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter, a novel based on the life of abolitionist John Brown, and Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, which chronicles the lives of a family of missionaries, Cunningham was certain he didn't stand a chance of winning the Pulitzer, which, by its own charter, is given to books that reflect the American experience.

"I thought, `How fabulous to be one of three people considered', but these other two books had Pulitzer written all over them and mine was an odd little thing about three women, one of whom was Virginia Woolf, and all three of whom have ambivalent sexuality. Lesbians? Virginia Woolf?", Cunningham laughs again, "I guess not!"

The Pulitzer jury must have found in Cunningham's novel the same deep psychological delving balanced by delicate prose that has won over critics and so many readers. There is also the considerable courage of taking on a classic novel, not to debunk it, but to acknowledge its greatness and then play variations on its themes, as one jazz musician riffs on the established work of another. "I was as intimidated as hell, and still can't believe I pulled it off," says Cunningham. "My favorite thing about winning is the implication that a book about these three women, again, women of ambivalent sexuality, one of whom is Virginia Woolf, is, in the eyes of this particular jury, an essential part of the American experience. I love that about it."

There are other implications of the Pulitzer, as well as the PEN/Faulkner award that he had collected just four days earlier, that Cunningham finds less agreeable, namely the notion that his work has in some sense vanquished books written by other authors. "Prizes are good for publicity," he says. "They are bad for literature."

But part of that publicity will have the salutary effect of bringing new readers to Woolf, a writer whom Cunningham credits with changing the course of his life at age 15. "I first read her when I was living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, where I went to a not particularly good public high school, where I was a not particularly good student," he says.

A typical child of the late 1960s, Cunningham was more interested in listening to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen than reading, until an older student at his high school asked him to read Woolf and T.S. Eliot almost as a dare. "She was just one of those girls, really tough, a smoker and a drinker, but really smart too," says Cunningham. "One day she just threw Mrs. Dalloway at me and said, here, read this and try to be less stupid."

Reading the book pried open a door that Cunningham would not be fully ready to step through for years to come. "I didn't really understand it, but there was something about Mrs. Dalloway that knocked me out, something about the language and the music of it. I hadn't known that you could do that. I had read A Separate Peace and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, which are perfectly fine books. But they didn't seem like magic to me; they didn't seem like art. I learned a little late - but not too late, fortunately - what you could do that with ink and paper, that you could create that kind of mystery and depth and music and strangeness with words."

Cunningham didn't start writing immediately, but he did start reading. After studying painting while at Stanford University, he eventually turned to prose and joined the long-standing artists' colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the very tip of the Cape Cod peninsula. His 1990 debut novel, the story of a friendship between two gay men, a woman and her child, titled A Home at the End of the World was a critical success and is still a favourite of a great many young readers, while Cunningham's second outing, Flesh and Blood, had mixed reviews in 1995.

Entirely unlike either book, at least in form, The Hours began life as a straightforward retelling of Woolf's day in the life of a well-to-do Englishwoman, only set in the present-day Manhattan in a neighbourhood crowded with gay coffee shops, gyms and bars. "It was going to be Mrs. Dalloway with a 52year-old gay man at the centre of it and a big party at the end," says Cunningham, who lives with his partner, psychologist Ken Corbett, in just such a neighbourhood, the west side district of Chelsea.

But after a year of writing, Cunningham came to regard his attempt at adaptation as "a parlour trick" with not much to add to the original. "The point that I wanted to make about gay male society - to treat it as an important landscape - just didn't pan out. I mean, who cares? Well, I care, but it wasn't enough to write a novel about."

Cunningham resisted the temptation to throw out the project completely, nudging it along for two more years until he had constructed a complex structure built around three women: a suicidal Los Angeles housewife of the 1940s, Woolf on the day she first contemplated writing Mrs. Dalloway, and a contemporary New York book editor who is preparing to throw a party for a friend dying of AIDS. One of Cunningham's biggest accomplishments was to stretch the concerns of his characters over time and two continents without overpowering them with his startlingly vivid portrait of the streets he knows best.

"I wanted to bequeath to my city some of the grandeur that Woolf brings to London or that Henry James brought to Washington Square. Often, I've thought that great scenes in literature are set somehow in a more definite, distinct, pure world, and I wanted to slap myself and say, `No, this is the world. This is the same world that Homer and Plato wrote about.' " He's at it again, laughing at his own accomplishments. "We just have more appliances now."

The Hours is published by Fourth Estate