Carl Tighe, an English writer of Irish descent, worked in Poland during the hard times of the 1970s. He decided to turn his hair-raising stories into a novel, which his landlady obligingly published and submitted for a Whitbread literary award. Penelope Dening reports on a writer's dreamcome true

With about 90,000 books published each year in the United Kingdom, a bare 5,000 of which might get reviewed, the chances of an unknown author hitting the big time are negligible, and even less likely when the writer can't even interest an agent or mainstream publisher. Yet this is what Carl Tighe has done with Burning Worm, one of four books shortlisted for tomorrow's Whitbread First Novel Award and, therefore, a possible candidate for Whitbread's overall Book of the Year Award, which, at £25,000 sterling (more than €40,000/£31,500), is Britain's most valuable literary award.

Last year, after four years of rejection letters and manuscripts returned unread, Tighe's former landlady Madeleine Rose felt impelled to set up a small press purely to put her former tenant into print. (To this day, IMPress has no other authors on its list.) As an arts administrator in Manchester, Rose had experience of setting up funding for dance projects. Not only did she think Tighe was good, she knew others thought so, too: in 1993 a collection of short stories, Rejoice!, had been shortlisted for an Irish Times fiction award.

Tighe had also had one positive response from the trade: an editor at a big-name publisher had read the manuscript and wanted to publish it but had been overruled on the grounds that the book would not be commercially viable. Tighe remembers his mixed emotions of elation and depression. "She told me: 'I have never read anything like this. It's tragic and it's farcical by turns, a wonderful combination, tremendous atmosphere, and I do hope you find somewhere to publish it.' " She was careful not to put her thoughts in writing, however.

In his office at the University of Derby, where he runs a creative-writing course, Tighe still keeps a list above his desk of writers who were similarly rejected, from William Golding, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce to Beatrix Potter and, more recently, J.K. Rowling and Timothy Mo.

First, "as a toe-in-the-water exercise", came Pax: Variations, three short stories and an essay on "what-if?" historical fiction that promptly won a writer of the year award from City Life, Manchester's leading listing magazine. Emboldened, Burning Worm was put in hand. "Madeleine warned me that I shouldn't expect to make any money from it," he says, "that I should think of it as an arts project." The budget was so tight that only 250 copies were printed.

Set in Poland over the winter of 1980-81, Burning Worm is a tragicomic account, in the tradition of Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal, of the cold, queues, food shortages and political skulduggery faced by a curiously detached English teacher in Cracow as the Solidarity dream turned sour. "A brilliant observer . . . Like the great Ryszard Kapuscinski, the author puts you there . . . Unforgettable," wrote Time Out in a glowing half-page review.

So how did Time Out get hold of a review copy? It certainly wasn't sent one - none of the 50 sent to the press elicited a response. Tighe's guardian angel realised that, as a publisher, she could submit such titles as she thought fit for any literature awards on the horizon - to wit the Whitbread. A few weeks later they got the call: photograph, biographical details and four more copies, please. Time Out's review, it turned out, had come courtesy of one of the Whitbread judges.

Tighe was born in the late 1940s in an immigrant area of Birmingham. His father had arrived from Dublin just before the second World War and stayed. Although his mother's family had lived in England for two generations, the family was still very Irish. "We were brought up in an Irish immigrant world, and that means poor, poor as hell. It wasn't a cool thing to be Irish in the 1950s, and outside school we were identified immediately as Irish; in the school we were quite likely to be beaten up for being English, and chased and gangsterised, because we didn't have an Irish accent."

Although his father became English "by default", Tighe opted for an Irish passport. "In a way I felt I paid for this identify, and I had the scars to prove it." And not only metaphorically - "my brother and I do wear scars from being whipped by nuns. It was a very intense immigrant community, and it was policed by the nuns, who brutalised to a purpose. We realised we could not quite make the grade, because we were not quite Irish enough."

He stopped being a Catholic, he says, at the age of seven, "the day I stepped into the Catholic school. It was instant. I just took one look at the place and thought, this is not be for me. I learned to endure."

Tighe's ability to endure would serve him well when, later, he took a British Council teaching job in Poland, first in the mid-1970s, in Wroclaw, then in Gdansk and, five years later, in Cracow, several hundred miles to the south. "I think in lots of ways the communities were very similar. Both have this enormous rural history and a social make-up and history that is very similar, a history of occupation and partition - they actually acquired their independence within a couple of years of each other - and there is a great similarity in the mindset and mentality that these histories generate.

"Ireland had become quite painful for me as a home territory, but it was not anything I was prepared to relinquish. Ever. But it was difficult to get close to. In a way Poland was my substitute, my surrogate. I could be a foreigner there. And be seen to be a foreigner. And it wasn't a problem. I could even live to be a quite a well-informed foreigner, which wasn't the case in Ireland."

The stories linking the narrative of Burning Worm began as anecdotes of Tighe's time in Poland, which he would recount to incredulous friends. "I started to think that it could be something more in 1983. It was at a conference of Welsh writers, and the poet John Tripp, dead now, took me aside and said: "You must write these down. You have to leave a record of these stories. These are not just things that happened to you, there is something bigger than just a little story you can throw away late-night.' "

What Tighe had already thrown away, however, was much of the documentary evidence of those days. Like Eugene Hinks, his protagonist, there came a time when Tighe felt it was too dangerous to hand on anything that could be taken as evidence of spying. "Fortunately, I have a steel memory, and I have a very clear memory of the time I was in Poland."

Although written in the first person, Burning Worm is in no sense a memoir, he insists, although everything in the book happened either to him or to people close to him. "It took me a long time to realise that it was not a rather strange collection of short stories but was in fact a novel, a fictional entity, but which has a really firm, observed, rooted basis in street life, in daily life, in normal life."

In 1980-81, when Solidarity took over power, Tighe's overriding feeling had been one of excitement. But bungling mismanagement led to privation and misery on a scale that seems barely credible; as an outsider, he was ill prepared.

In the West, where Solidarity was haloed in the warm glow of popular uprising, Tighe's account is shocking. "If my mother had not sent me food parcels, and if I had not become a reasonable scavenger, I think I came very close to not getting through. I got asthma as a result the stress and damp and cold and very poor diet. Sometimes you wouldn't eat the whole day. I remember telling my brother how there was no food in the shops, and he said: 'You mean like Marks & Spencer after the sales?' And I said: 'No. I mean no food, nothing.'

"The first week I was back there, in 1980, I went into the local supermarket and there were bags of bay leaves and vinegar. Nothing else. Nothing else at all. Not just a bit of nothing else. There was nothing there. Even the most inventive cook would find it difficult to make something out of bay leaves and vinegar. But I think it's very difficult to understand that depth of suffering."

Tighe was last in Poland in 1992, when things had vastly improved, at least in the major cities. But for the people he knew in 1980-81, who were then "the rising generation, the university lecturers, the researchers, the inventors", the change has been devastating. "They're on the scrap heap now. Too old to learn new tricks."

Still reeling from the shock of making it onto the Whitbread shortlist and the logistics of getting books into shops, Tighe and Rose have yet to find a Polish publisher for Burning Worm. "It would be very nice if one came forward, but I'm aware that it might be difficult for the Polish to accept that an outsider can write about their culture in that way. Polish national pride is very strong. It's not meant to be offensive, but I just wanted to capture a 16-month-long moment, and it's meant to do it as vividly as I can."

Burning Worm is published by IMPress, £8 in UK