Everything you wanted to know about Seth

VIKRAM Seth leans against a door frame, his face pinched with exhaustion and pain, his back sagging with the strain of two hours standing, too long sleeping in strange, soft beds. His shirt is creased, his thinning hair awry; a small, rumpled man whose life has been taken over by a very large book. His book.

He's not complaining: 'Would I have been happier if it had sunk like a stone? No,' he says. But more than a year after he hit the publicity trail to promote A Suitable Boy, the 1,473-page novel he took eight years to write, Seth admits: 'This fat book is dragging me along in its wake.' His publishers had asked him to help with its translation and he refused. But he agreed to help publicise the new versions, imagining just a French, and perhaps a German edition, years away and demanding three or four days from him. He little realised the precedent he was setting.

'Now the translations are coming out. That is something I had not reckoned on so soon. I thought, 'such a fat book, it will take three or four years to do'. But the Norwegian edition is coming out now.

'The problem really is that I never imagined it would be translated into more than one language.' Soon there will be French, German, Spanish and Italian editions, then Hebrew, Korean, Czech, Hungarian, and Danish. Forty-two-year-old Seth, his eyes ringed with dark circles, his suitcase crammed with the special back supports he carries to ease his aches, is the victim of his own success.

Tonight the fat book has brought him to a reception at Singapore's British High Commissioner's residence, part of his jammed schedule for the week-long Commonwealth Writers Prize presentation. Seth, whose omission from the Booker Prize shortlist was seen by some as a literary scandal, has arrived as the Eurasia section winner and will leave with the recognition the Booker judges denied him - winner of the GBP10,000 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

The hotel switchboard is alive with calls from his local relatives demanding his attendance at family functions and our interview came at two minutes' notice before the bus left for tonight's reception.