Interview: Andrew O'Hagan on his fifth novel, The Illuminations

Scottish author Andrew O'Hagan earned a reputation for blurring the boundaries between memoir, journalism and the literary genre with his debut non-fiction work, The Missing , in 1995 - along with shortlistings for the Booker prize, the Whitbread Award and the IMPAC Award. Since then he has cemented his reputation as one of his generation's most exciting writers with such disparate novels as Our Fathers , Personality , Be Near Me and The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe , as well as his non-fiction works and essays -including his recent essay for the London Review of Books , Ghosting Julian Assange . He talks to about his latest and fifth novel, The Illuminations , which shines a light not just on the battlefront of the Afghanistan war, a conflict he describes as Britain's Vietnam, but the home front.

I heard the voice of this elderly lady, Anne Quirk, while imagining her standing at a window seeing a rabbit run through the snow - that was the beginning. My mother had told me about a person she knew who had, as it turned out, dementia, but her past was beginning to emerge just as her memory was diminishing. That seemed to me such an incredible dynamic in life - that your memory should fade and at the same time the truth from the past should emerge. And I thought, "I'm having that," and I went after Anne Quirk. From the very beginning, her experience bore a strong resemblance to that of Margaret Watkins, the Canadian-born photographer who died in obscurity in Glasgow in 1969. Watkins was a fantastic artist, and I'd hoped that one of the things the novel might do was alert people to the neglected genius of this woman.

I first saw Watkins' photographs in a photography magazine and was immediately struck by how powerful they were. They seemed miracles of light and grace, and I then went to find as much as I could of Watkins' life and work. She had spent the last four decades of her life in Glasgow, near where I grew up. It seemed so moving to me that she'd lost her professional footing, being drawn - like so many talented women - into a life of domestic duties. I found these words she wrote about missing the artistic crowd, their "strange gleam of vision, something worth striving for, something a bit beyond the end of their small human noses" in a book, and was struck by them. These seemed to energise my whole sense of Anne Quirk. And in a sense they are the rationale for the whole novel, because I think all its characters in different ways struggle as Watkins did to see life and be in life in as true a way as possible. So I wanted to set in train a little moral drama that got to the heart of this problem, a problem of our time, especially, of how to live and what to do. How to be authentic in a time when there's so much manufactured life to contend with. A war situation is a manufactured narrative now as much as a photograph is digitally enhanced.