When and why did you start writing?

I wanted to be a countryside painter when young, but hadn't the talent. As regards my life, I started out as an actor (working in Dublin and London) and then a fringe theatre director, and script writer, all roads on the way to prose writing: I 'film' my characters in their various locations, the interior and exterior 'shots', acting out the dialogue and directing the various bits of business, setting the whole thing first, and then nipping back, as it were, behind the camera - Charles Dickens, giving advice to an unpublished comtempory, told him to create his characters and then withdraw, let them have the stage. As far as I'm concerned the less an author is 'seen', the better. I won't even use, say, a semi colon in my fiction - although an elegant stop otherwise - considering it to be too intrusive, a fingerprint of the author on the page.

How long did it take you to write the Cuckoos of Batch Magna and how did you find the process?

Difficult to say. I had most of the characters in mind for some time, based on people from my own, rather bohemian, past, and a time spent, gloriously free, living on houseboats. When we moved to the Welsh Marches I found what I was looking for. I made the usual false starts, haring off enthusiastically in one direction or another, and then having to come back again (to bin the work), working on different plots, changing people who had once been real into characters for a novel, shaping them to fit more fully, more truthfully, the story. A couple of years, I suppose, of actual writing time.

Your novel is set on the Wales-England border. Does the book reflect any perceived differences between the character of the Welsh and English?

I think it does, yes (I hope it does, certainly when it comes to dialogue). The Welsh as Celts are story tellers, natural actors. The English will relate events as they happened, information to be imparted; the Welsh, like the Irish (I am an Englishman who is part Welsh and Irish) will tell you a story and because of this they use language in a different way; it is rarely simply a vehicle to get to A to B (I once heard a Welsh girl behind the counter of a local shop telling her colleague that her boyfriend, to make up for whatever, had brought her flowers the night before. 'He came armed,' she said, 'with roses'.

What themes are dealt with in the first novel?

Well, I could talk rather earnestly about the triumph of community over commercialism, the people over the dollar (as one reviewer, noting that the pivotal character was an American, saw it; but the people only triumphed because the 'go-getting' American was at heart a lotus eater as well, another dreamer - only he didn't know that until the last chaper), but I'm not at all sure that the book has a theme, and certainly not one you could hang a thesis on. It was, after all, described by another reviewer as The Wind in the Willows for grown-ups.

How is work on the second book in the series coming along and when is it due to be published?

I'm delighted to say that I've done all the haring off in wrong directions bit, and now it's firmly on its wheels and pointing towards home. It's currently motoring along under the title of Sir Humphrey at Batch Hall - and it's due out early next year.

Do you write for a living or do you have another job?

I am also a book seller.

What are your plans for the future?

Well, my work will never throw light on the human condition, nor does it have the weight to change lives, but I hope it entertains, and if I can keep on doing that, while getting better at it, then that will do me.

Q&A with author Peter Maughan