The only concession to his old artistic bent would be a refusal to appease middle America. He would write a thriller from a European perspective, giving his continental comrades all the funny lines, the sex and the triumph. American characters would be blandly drawn villains: dull-witted bullet magnets.

'I went through this whole thought process and then I realised I cannot write that book,' Meek says when we meet in Adelaide. 'I'm just not sure I have the skills. There is an assumption by so-called literary novelists that if they chose to they could write mass-market genre fiction. But I'm not sure most of them could.'

Meek doubted he was capable of sticking to a plan for an entire manuscript. Literary digressions were certain to freeze his pot-boiler. He'd have to settle for writing about the man he didn't become: the journalist who wrote the sell- out book.

Just as well: that thriller would have spoiled one of the rare happy stories for literary fiction in the real world: The People's Act of Love became the sort of unpredictable, irrepressible hit that unnerves the marketing departments of the publishing industry.

'By writing a book about communism, cannibalism and castration in early 20th-century Siberia I was zooming in on some obvious commercial angle,' Meek jokes.

No one can say whether the success of The People's Act of Love came from word-of-mouth or reviews. The novel was just good, winning the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and making the long-list for the Man Booker. More than 250,000 copies have sold in 20 languages. Johnny Depp is apparently mutating the novel into a film. All the novelist knows about that plan is the cash the Hollywood star sent for the rights, which went into the pile that these days allows Meek to insist on being called a former journalist.

Pages from the fake thriller are scattered throughout We Are Beginning Our Descent, the story of Adam Kellas, a war correspondent in post-Taleban Afghanistan who has a manuscript for an airport novel about a military showdown between Europe and the US.

Meek denies the novel is autobiographical, although he is less emphatic about a character known as 'the guy from the Guardian' who appears briefly to arouse the jealousy of Kellas and is described as 'a small pale man with delicate hands, gingerish hair, round glasses and a slightly lopsided smile'.

While Kellas falls for a self-destructive fellow journalist and defiles his own thinking by writing the thriller, the real Meek keeps a photograph of himself writing The People's Act of Love in Kabul. He is proud of producing a book of literary fiction every four years while working in Iraq during the first Gulf war and after the 2003 US invasion, as well as Afghanistan, Moscow and Kiev in the 1990s.

He tried to make his journalism career as interesting as possible but rejects the idea that he sought exotic, dangerous situations as material for his fiction. 'I got material out of journalism but I wasn't looking for it. Everything is material for a novelist; never invite a novelist to your house,' Meek says.

The literary benefit of geographical and cultural distance from home is the chance to read. Meek resigned from the Scotsman after returning from the first Gulf war. At 29, he was bored with Scottish news and out of favour with senior journalists who wanted to 'clip my wings'.

He drove for five days, reaching Kiev with little command of Russian and a vague freelance deal with the Guardian. He returned home in 1999 to 'reconnect' with his first language and its changing forms. Meek found life as an isolated expatriate helped his literature.

'When I lived in Kiev I had this university-type time. Living was cheap and I had a lot of time to read. The reading life of the writer isn't always brought out in interviews. People are interested in writing. But what you read is vastly important, probably more important than what you experience directly.

'That might sound strange but, after all, whatever you do you're going to have experiences, anywhere and any time. Any people can be material for your novels.

'But just reading and being exposed to different modes of writing, letting the great writers of your choice be your teacher, is very important,' he says.

The limitations of his journalism became apparent as he dealt with people transforming themselves in the post-Soviet world.

'It was always very distracting to be interviewing someone for the newspaper about something very specific when I was more interested in their life stories. I was travelling around Russia and being among people who had an extraordinary story. Everyone had such a story and of course they didn't consider it extraordinary,' he says. 'People are more settled now but in the 90s everyone had made some sort of great journey and there had been suffering, extreme temperatures, wars, ridiculous stories of fame and going into space and multiple marriages and screwing around. There was great richness.'

His quandary became more apparent during the 'war on terror'. Meek remembers watching a US military affairs officer helping a Baghdad man put his friend's corpse into the boot of a car. US troops had mistakenly murdered the friend, yet the owner of the car repeatedly thanked the officer as they 'manhandled' the body into an ill-fitting space and attempted to cover it with small garbage bags.

'You can't convey the thing that you most want to convey [in journalism], no matter how well you do it,' he says. 'I wanted to get across the layered weirdness of this scene. The simple thing to write would be: horror, horror. But there's also this awareness that the same scene in America could be portrayed in a TV show as quite comical. If this had happened in the officer's own country it would be major crime, but here it was okay.

'I mentioned this in a Guardian article. I was quite glad to hear that some people were upset and found it in bad taste. If you're not upsetting people, all you're doing is writing some kind of emotive piece about how you experienced the horrors of war. That's what people expect you to write and it makes them feel good and sorrowful and then they go off dancing or whatever,' he says.

But 'you want to write something niggly that gets under the reader's skin. It's difficult to do and the editors don't always allow it. I suppose that's the sort of emotion that going through my hero's head [in We Are Now Beginning Our Descent].'

Kellas copes well enough in a war zone but falls to pieces in London amid competing idealisations of people and distant events. Regardless of whether Descent is autobiographical, Meek concedes that the use of events from his life is more the stuff of a debut novel than an established author who has made his name with historical fiction. Creating novels is torture enough without resisting good ideas, even if they appear out of normal sequence.

'It's hard for me to believe that any writer of substance doesn't find the act of writing a novel a very, very difficult process with many, many problems to overcome. As soon as you put down words that sounded great in your head, the problems begin. Writing any book is a process of overcoming problems.'

Meek asks for feedback from friends and colleagues by giving them pieces of his manuscripts. He wants them to identify the symptoms of his failings but he feels that only the author can diagnose the disease. But letting someone see an entire manuscript too early might sway him from what he wants to write.

'I've been surprised by the number of people, usually men, who read the fragments of the fake thriller in We Are Now Beginning Our Descent and said they'd quite like to read that book,' Meek says with a laugh. 'So, who knows, if things get tough for me maybe I'll finish that one.'

Writer's notes

Name: James Meek, born in London in 1962 and raised in Dundee, Scotland

Lives: London

Genre: Literary fiction

Works: Two short story collections - Last Orders (1992) and Museum of Doubt (2000) - and novels McFarlane Boils the Sea (1989), Drivetime (1995), The People's Act of Love (2005) and We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008)

What the critics say: The People's Act of Love 'is a big, bold, thrillingly different story told with uncanny authority. Meek understands the horrific power of evil, but he never loses his sense or his affection for those moments of grace that keep the human heart alive.' - Michael Faber, novelist

Author's bookshelf

Busconductor Hines

by James Kelman

'This is a masterpiece. It was a big influence in all sorts of ways, in terms of style, in terms of toughness, the social situation the characters were in.'

In the Penal Colony

by Franz Kafka

'It's one of his lesser-known short stories but it should be better known because it's very modern. It anticipated the state of the modern world. I was thinking of the story when I wrote Descent. That sense of being a close witness but not being involved in something ... that's what In the Penal Colony is all about.'

Disgrace

by J.M. Coetzee

'I've been reading Coetzee a lot. I recently met him in Adelaide. I'm going to work through his back catalogue.'

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

by James Hogg

'That's the one that worked best for me in bridging the gap between Scottish writers and modern Europe. Between Faust and Beckett; the somewhat metaphysical and surreal style of writing and the very real, gritty texture of Scottish life.'

The Smoking Diaries

by Simon Gray

'A very funny and moving work.'