More reserved writers in business shirts and baggy denim try to pin down a time to share a drink with the New Yorker, who is dressed for any occasion in smart jeans, Prada spectacles and an embroidered 1950s-style short-sleeve brown shirt straight from the wardrobe of Seinfeld's Kramer. He is graciously keen to thank anyone for the privileges coming his way.

'Writing is the least strenuous job I've had,' Diaz says while taking a seat outside and looking over Sydney Harbour. 'Punching in and having [someone] order you around all day is not fun. I did a lot of that. It seems like a mild thing to be paid to talk about books.'

He fires off a long spiel about how reading saved an immigrant kid from working in the factories of

New Jersey.

'My reading is more important than my writing,' he says. 'I'm a reader first and foremost. No question. That's my real identity.

My sideline's writing. I read a book this morning. I read Tim Winton's Breath. It's spectacular. I went through it in a couple of hours.

What reading does to me is it adds to my optimism.'

Diaz's family left the Dominican Republic when he was six years old, settling down in New Jersey. Abandoned by his father, Diaz says his family was typical of America's 'working poor, where everybody works extremely hard but the ends just never meet'.

He was never encouraged to read yet found an obsession for books that went beyond any sense that they could help him at school. He says he remembers receiving no encouragement to engage at school and being forced to take night classes by his mother, who feared he would spend his life reading Stephen King while working in the steel mill where he saw men lose hands and suffer serious burns. 'A typical kid from my background didn't graduate from high school. We were push-promoted. It means they just signed off on your paperwork,' he says. 'The teachers usually went out of their way to tell you, 'We just want you the f*** out of here. We don't care that you didn't pass any of the requirements.'

'It wasn't until I started taking night classes that I suddenly became interested in things. I would never have realised that school was important if my mom hadn't forced me to take some night classes. That just saved my life in a way.'

He had a string of tough jobs while pushing his way through graduate school and realising that his only potential lay in literature and history. By his mid-20s he had an MFA from Cornell University and encouragement from Toni Morrison to become a writer.

Diaz refused to believe her until 1996, when his collection of short stories, Drown, brought the kind of exposure no publisher's marketing budget could afford. He had created the perfect storm of controversy and praise with his autobiographical slant on Dominican immigrants, but Diaz denies he was the Zadie Smith of the 1990s.

'It was no White Teeth but I guess I got lucky. I had this wonderful book of short stories. It was minor acclaim in the literary world. Among the literary nerds there was, 'Rah, rah, well done.''

As the literary establishment made him a member, leaving space on the shelf for the new novelistic shapes he seemed destined to offer, Diaz reluctantly shook off the expectation that he should focus on a sensible job that would pay for his science fiction addiction.

'Even though I really wanted to live a life of the mind and live a life with books, there was a big part of me that just resisted that. There was a voice saying, 'You know what?

This is a little pipe dream of yours and you gotta be f***ing serious, you gotta be really in this world.' When Drown was published I realised I had to stop being half-arsed about it. I had to commit myself to this work.'

Diaz has now retreated in his seat, seemingly hoping to avoid the inevitable next question about how he coped with the expectations created by Drown. 'Oh, by spending the next 11 years failing.'

The eyes refuse to come back from the harbour.

Diaz's shoulders have folded forward and his right heel is tapping the ground like a piston as he describes the struggle to write his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and to have confidence in it even now, almost a year after its release, a Pulitzer and commercial success.

'It wasn't as difficult as working but it was an emotionally challenging period. I guess I wanted to write but spent 11 years not being able to write what I wanted to write. Everything I tried fell apart. I don't know if I did it to myself. You know, bro, sometimes a lot of bad luck comes together at once, a bunch of weird s*** happens simultaneously,' he says.

'I was so disappointed that I couldn't pull it together. But I just kept working.'

While writing 'bad iterations' of Wao that amounted to thousands of pages, Diaz thought of Hard-Boiled, the 1992 Hong Kong film directed by John Woo.

'I was one of those kids who watched Hard-Boiled when it was first released. I was always into these action films. My friend was translating the Chinese for me. There's a great line: You can't lose forever. I've always remembered that and my friends always remind me of it. They'd always be, like, 'Yeah, it ain't working out but you can't lose forever. Things will work out.' I only realised that the book was done about a year before publication. There was this moment when I realised there was nothing else I could do to add to the book and that I had burned away almost everything that I could. It was as burned away as I could get it. Then I handed it in to my press. They said, 'We're going to go with it and you've got six months to rewrite it.''

The exuberant story of generations of a Dominican family battling a 'fuku' curse and dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina reads as though it burst from the mind and refused to be edited. Bouncing backwards and forwards in time, between the obese Oscar's search for love and his family's oppression in its homeland, the novel stops only for rambling footnotes on Dominican history, Run Run Shaw movies and comics.

Creating the illusion of spontaneous prose was a big part of Diaz's battle. 'In literature, ebullience is as much artefact as control. One of the very important things for me was that it was a book that felt like it was simultaneously exploding but held together. So there's all these characters and all these allusions and all of these images of exploded selves and exploded texts and fragments that piece themselves back together. That was one of the structural interests that I had and it required an enormous amount of discipline and throwing out stuff.

'Of course, the book doesn't resemble what I set out to write. But it did what I wanted it to do. I wanted something that I thought was emblematic of the Caribbean - there are more absences than presences, I wanted this kind of non-stop fragmentation that despite itself still held together and I wanted a book that had the challenges that most people write about, personal and national histories that co-exist without eliminating each other.

'The final thing that was interesting to me was that the book was funny and tragic. Neither would neutralise the other, they would exist fully together. I might be just being vainglorious, but I don't think that's easily achieved. I was very happy when that was achieved and that it worked for me.'

Diaz says he still has little notion of what to write next. But he won't let the Pulitzer Prize affect him in the same way as the success of Drown.

'I put more pressure on myself than any prize,' he says before finding his smile and bopping back into the lobby's welcoming crowd.

Writer's notes

Name: Junot Diaz

Born: December 31, 1968, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Moved to New York at six

Genre: Literary fiction

Works: Drown (1996), a collection of short stories; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

Next project: 'Nothing, really. I haven't gotten a handle on what to do next.

'I keep wanting to write this apocalyptic, mad science fiction book that has had a hold on me for many years. But I don't have an 'in' yet. I'm writing a lot and throwing away a lot. One day something will catch, a chapter will not be thrown away and then it begins.'

What the critics say: 'A streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language in the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides.

'He conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams;

and America (aka New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they've fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.'

- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, on Diaz's prose

Author's bookshelf

Dawn by Octavia Butler

'She has an ability to make historical questions new

and relevant.'

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

'He's probably the greatest living American writer. Very few people outside the US know about him.'

Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau

'I love his work for his linguistic inventiveness and brilliance.'

Breath by Tim Winton

'He's extradordinary. Winning

the Pulitzer is weird in some

ways because so many writers go their whole lives without getting the main prizes. Yet they're incredible writers. Tim Winton is a perfect example.'