Ozick, who turned 80 this year, was presented with two lifetime achievement laurels in May: the PEN/Nabokov award for 'enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship', and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, an award given annually since 1988 in the memory of Jewish-American writer Bernard Malamud.

The PEN/Nabokov judges laud Ozick for 'a prodigious imagination, a relentless intellectual and [an] endless appetite for investigation and truth telling', while according to Alan Cheuse of the PEN/Malamud selection committee: 'No American writer working today is as close in soul and style to Bernard Malamud as Cynthia Ozick, and no American writer working today is more distinctive in everything she does on the page.'

Although Ozick was sometimes categorised alongside late Jewish-American legends Malamud, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow, she resists the 'Jewish writer' label.

'To be Jewish implies all that the commandments require - good behaviour, decent citizenship - and being a writer requires complete unrestraint and also identification with villains. You can be one thing in life and another in the privacy of the imagination but put them together and they will implode. You will end up writing treacle - sermons and tracts,' she says.

Subscribing to Theodor Adorno's dictum 'After Auschwitz, no more poetry', Ozick believes authors should avoid writing fiction about the Holocaust. 'I worry about the mythopoeticisation, given all the Holocaust denial.' But Ozick has never been able to elude the subject. As she once wrote: 'It rises up and claims my furies.'

In The Shawl, often regarded as her masterpiece, Ozick depicts a Nazi officer flinging the heroine's infant against an electric fence. 'It may sound mystically grandiose, but the first five pages of The Shawl felt dictated. The words and images came of themselves - a strangely transcendent sensation, one I've never had before or since.'

Ozick's stature as a fiction writer is matched by her renown as an essayist. Critic James Wood has called her America's greatest practitioner of the genre. Ozick's five essay collections - Art & Ardour, Metaphor & Memory, Fame & Folly, Quarrel & Quandary and, most recently, The Din in the Head - are distinguished by their moral gravity, her literary criticism as tough-minded as her combative defences of Israel.

'I am fevered in my historical, philosophical and existential concern for Israel, which the western intelligentsia, blindly following the historical falsehoods of the so-called Palestinian 'narrative', has turned into a pariah.'

The child of Russian-Jewish pharmacists, Ozick was raised in the Bronx and was one of the few Jewish students at her school. 'There was a great deal of anti-Semitism, both from other students and teachers.' Her high-school years, 'the crest of life', coincided with the Holocaust.

While her older brother was off in the army, Ozick was immersed in Virgil and the Romantic poets. Only in retrospect did she feel guilty. 'I am nonplussed by how blissful I was in the very hour when my teenaged Jewish counterparts in Europe were being incinerated.'

Ozick completed her master's thesis on the later novels of Henry James but decided against pursuing a doctorate, fearing that academia would distract her from her writing. 'There was this small period where to get a PhD was regarded as a terrible shame for a writer. It was the influence of Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway, who went straight into journalism and into worldliness.'

At 22, Ozick set to work on a 400,000-word 'philosophical novel', Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love. She intended the Jamesian saga, which set passion against reason, to be her magnum opus.

However the manuscript grew increasingly unwieldy and Ozick's husband, a lawyer, began joking about her futile years suckling Mercy.

After seven years, she finally weaned herself off Mercy and began her 600-page debut novel, Trust. Another seven-year labour, Trust 'became even more ambitious than [Mercy]. I attempted to tackle every variety of distrust there might be in families, in history, in politics, in art, in belief, in love, in marriage.'

In 1980, Ozick became embroiled in a legal tussle, when the headmaster of her daughter's Jewish school identified with a character in a story published in The New Yorker. Ozick depicted a headmaster engaging in premarital sex. Only later, she says, did she discover that 'this fictional event was, as the pulps used to say, 'true to life'. Eventually, an out-of-court settlement was reached but Ozick's contract with The New Yorker was suspended and she 'was afraid to write for a year'.

Despite having never again matched her early ambition, Ozick remains a fierce defender of high art. 'There used to be a high brow, middle brow and no brow. That hierarchy is now absolutely erased. Everything has become popular entertainment. It makes it difficult for seriousness to be understood, welcomed and appreciated.'

Her devotion to writing is every bit as consuming as it was in her early 20s. Ozick bemoans the time taken up with daily banalities. 'So much of life is debris and detritus and interruption.'