Foreign affairs

ANDREW O'CONNOR reckons he must be sick. The 28-year-old Australian author says he can't experience anything without wanting to jot it down for use in a book. 'It's a sickness,' he says, laughing over coffee at a Pret a Manger in the Fulham Broadway tube station, near his current home in London.

'Everything you do, see or experience feeds into a book,' he says. 'You can't switch off, which is a shame. I once heard an interview with David Mitchell, who said he'd seen a person in Japan just standing there wailing in the street. Instead of empathy or sympathy or helping, he thought, 'I could use that'. Once you get to that point you're in trouble. You spend half your life watching, and noting - only half living.'

It's not a life-threatening condition, and it has served O'Connor well. When he was just 26, his first book, Tuvalu, scooped The Australian/Vogel literary prize for unpublished manuscripts by writers under 35, an award that has launched the careers of many Australian authors - and netted him A$20,000 (HK$120,820).

Tuvalu draws on his experiences from four years of teaching English in Japan, telling the story of 21-year-old Australian Noah Tuttle, lonely and bemused in Tokyo, where O'Connor spent a year. It chronicles how he struggles to figure out why he's in Japan, dealing with the cultural isolation and loneliness of the megalopolis and the Japanese, traversing relations with his distant Australian girlfriend and a wild fling with a kooky Japanese hotel heiress.

The book isn't autobiographical, O'Connor says. 'My life isn't nearly as exciting. It certainly draws on some personal experiences - the places some characters go to, and the things they do are quite true to the life I was living. But nothing more.

'Not all my writing comes from my experiences. I enjoy making stuff up and the challenge of making it gel and work - the challenge of trying to get people to think it's true. I like that challenge a lot, and enjoy the process, even though it took two to three years for Tuvalu.'