Feels good to be 'first'

After one hour's sleep, Rose Tremain is hoarsely struggling to convey the precise degree of elation she feels at having won the £30,000 Orange Broadband prize for fiction after years of being the uncomplaining, bestselling runner-up.

On June 4, The Road Home, her novel about the travails of an Eastern European immigrant to Britain, delivered her the imprimatur of literary recognition and, yes, “it felt pretty good''.

She had perfected her loser's smile. Instead, she had to give an acceptance speech.

Celebrated writer that she is, there was a feeling, not least to her, that the honour was a little overdue.

Tremain is rare in admitting the importance of prizes. She has won a few smaller ones — including the Whitbread Novel Award in 1999 for Music and Silence.

They are like speed bumps, she says. “It's disingenuous to pretend we are indifferent to them.

It's very crowded — the book world — and a prize focuses the spotlight — for which we feel grateful.''

As she speaks, a reprint of 5,000 copies is whirring away and her entire backlist of ten novels and short story collections is being re-jacketed.

“People say to me: ‘Do you write books for prizes?' It couldn't be farther from the truth.

"It is unreal, this media thing you go through — especially for writers, who are private people.

Writers these days have to be performers, they have to step into a presentational role, which is slightly alien.''

Insider truths

Tremain is fine-boned and serene. Though she claims sometimes to be hysterical, you cannot imagine her even ruffled.

She looks pretty much as she did nearly 20 years ago when she won her first accolade, a newspaper's book of the year award for Restoration.

She is often pigeonholed as a historical writer and this may explain why, even though her books sell between 200,000 and 250,000 copies and are published in 25 countries, she has not won a big prize before.

Novels such as Restoration (set during the reign of Charles II); Music and Silence (17th-century Danish court); and The Colour, with its background of the gold rush in New Zealand in the 1860s, may hold a mirror to contemporary society but are deemed not “to engage'' with modern times sufficiently.

“There is this terrible word ‘relevance' among prize judges,'' she says. “We are so obsessed with our own time.''

And she should know: she has twice sat on the Man Booker jury and understands the way the wheels work.

When The Road Home opens, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain seeking work, an idealistic man whose wife has died of cancer.

He needs money to send home to his mother and four-year-old daughter. But the country he finds at the end of his 50-hour bus journey is neither welcoming nor civilised.
The book may not be overtly political but it delivers a harsh commentary on city life — the exploitation and petty bureaucracy, dirty, hostile streets, rip-off merchants, squalid flats.

But there is comedy, too — kitchen life in a celebrity restaurant, a glimpse into the surreal cheeriness of a care home and labour in the asparagus fields of East Anglia.

It is not a big book but feels as though it is written on a big canvas. “When I started, my novels were rather small-scale. Then when I came to Restoration I found this big, noisy world and I've been in that noisy world ever since.''

The idea for the book took root when she saw a television programme in 2005 about immigrants in London.

Her theme was primed by a sequence of grim news stories about immigrants: the deaths of Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay, gang masters, people in wretched accommodation, labourers being bused to locations in the middle of the night.

“It was important to make Lev sympathetic,'' she says. “But he has this dark, angry side, too. I also wanted to explore his melancholy.

"It was a conscious decision to make him attractive to women — it would present a satisfactory set of complications in his life. But I didn't want the reader to feel pity for him.''

Rise to authorhood

Tremain was born in 1943 and had a difficult early life — her father walked out when she was 10.

She worked in publishing and as a picture researcher before teaching creative writing at the University of East Anglia for seven years, until 1995.

Though she had always written stories, she was 33 before her first book was published.

Her daughter, Ellie, 33, from her first marriage to Jon Tremain (whom she met while still studying at university), was once an actress but is now doing an MSc in psychotherapy.

Her second marriage was to Jonathan Dudley, a theatre director.

With her first prize of £20,000 in 1989 (“I was so poor at the time''), Tremain bought a Honda Accord, the first new car she had owned, and helped a friend who was in financial difficulties.

She is unsure how the Orange money will be spent. “But, for anyone creative, the lovely thing about being given bits of money is that it buys you more time.''