Hello, this is Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today is a Scottish novelist and essayist who's written seven novels, three of which have been nominated for the Booker Prize, including the shortlisted debut novel our fathers in 1999.
He's since won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the EM Forster Award, amongst others.
His books have been adapted for stage and screen, including the nonfiction book the Missing, Part reportage, part memoir, which became a BAFTA award winning TV series, A novel Be Near Me and Mayflies, which were adapted for productions at the Donmar Warehouse and BBC One, respectively.
He's an editor at large at the London Review of Books, where he's written about his experience as Julian Assange's ghostwriter.
He's a contributor to Esquire, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker.
He's a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and last month he was appointed as honorary professor at the University of Glasgow.
Andrew O'Hagan, it's such a pleasure to have you in the studio.
Great to be here.
Georgina.
Your book Caledonian Road has stormed the charts.
It's number one, It's a best seller.
It's been the most incredible experience.
You know, you work hard on these things, in this case for 10 years and you think it's a sort of dirty secret that you're keeping, you know, and you're not sure if you're, if you might be the only person actually in existence who enjoys this stuff.
So it's a great pleasure when you, you're freed from that notion and you see that other people are taking it up.
Absolutely.
Now, on this program, we like to look at the life of the writer as well as the book.
But in this case, it would seem to me that the background of your main protagonist, Campbell Flynn and yours, very, very similar.
They are pretty similar.