BRITISH literary magazine Granta started its once-a-decade selection of Best of Young British Novelists in 1983, with a list of 20 names long before they became internationally known.

Examples include then 29-year-old Kazuo Ishiguro before “The Remains of the Day” was published and then 35-year-old Ian McEwan just after his debut in 1978.

Last year, the magazine and publisher issued the fourth list, 20 young authors considered best in the past 10 years. As the special issue gets published in Chinese, novelist and poet Adam Foulds has been invited to visit Shanghai by the British Council and 99Reader, the Chinese publisher of Granta.

Now 40, he has published four novels since 2007 and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Costa Poetry Award, among various other prizes.

Long determined to be a writer, Foulds spent a good portion of his early years traveling, teaching, and working in shops and warehouses well into his 30th year while his Oxford classmates were becoming successful lawyers and academics.

“I didn’t have a particular plan at that point. I was just going to continue writing, and it was worrying,” he tells Shanghai Daily. “It wasn’t very strategic, other than the big simple idea that I didn’t want a job with any responsibility or that required me to think, basically. I wanted all of my mental capacity freed for writing, which was very risky, and got a little bit frightening at times.”

He wrote during lunch breaks, entering and exiting the world he creates, put away the first two books and finished “The Truth about These Strange Times.”

It follows the journey of an odd pair — a 10-year-old genius from an affluent family and a poorly educated young man from a completely different social class. The book was picked up more than half a year after he sent out from the warehouse.

By then he was working on “The Broken Word,” a narrative poem about the military conflict involving the British Army in 1950s Kenya known as the Mau Mau Uprising, which won him the Costa Poetry Award.

His third book, “The Quickening Maze,” is the story of the Victorian lunatic asylum where poets John Clare and Septimus Tennyson (brother of Alfred Tennyson) were incarcerated. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009. Early in January, he published the forth novel,  “In the Wolf’s Mouth,” following a young English officer and an American soldier as the Allied forces in World War II arrived in Sicily.

The scope of his subjects, themes and writing styles often impress and sometimes bewilder critics. He shares with Shanghai Daily how the stories were inspired, chosen, written and published.

Q: What inspired you to write “The Quickening Maze?”

A: The novel, set in Epping Forest about two poets, came out of various things in my life. I was also interested in environmentalism, with ideas of sanity and identity, and it is a very rich and exciting material all concentrated in this one dynamic place with a group of very interesting characters.

I had grown up in that part of Britain, just right on the edge of Epping Forest, so I knew the physical environment very well. I wanted to become a biologist when I was a boy, so I had a very strong connection with the landscape and the wildlife of that place. And I always had fascination with poetry.

So when I found out, in my university days, that John Clare, the great landscape poet, had been in this place, it suddenly became a very personal connection. And I knew I wanted to respond to that. And I knew it would not be my first book; it was 10 years until I felt I was ready to deal with that subject matter.

Q: What inspired “The Truth About These Strange Times?”

A: It came out of reading “War and Peace.” The character Pierre Bezukhov is very clever, eccentric, sincere and naïve, and he is also incredibly wealthy and receives an enormous inheritance right at the beginning of the novel. I wonder what his life might have been like if he hadn’t received that inheritance and hadn’t been as clever as he was.

This started me thinking about a philosophical question – the contingent instrumental version of human value versus a completely non-contingent and inane sense of human value. Why are people valuable? Is it because of what they do, what they achieve, what they give to the society?

So my main character, who had sort of grown out of my reading of Bezukhov, was someone who was not useful to society, not talented, not someone you would notice in daily life. I wanted to investigate his value as a person and to explore and to collide that with people who don’t value others in that way. He is a variation of Berzukhov with different context, stripped of the brains and money.

Q: Why do you strip off brains, as well?

A: Because brains can convert easily into rewards. It is a value and gives you the capacity to succeed in the society. And I was interested in the people who are educationally deprived, who have constraints to their hardware, who don’t have the capacity or option to become professional and earn a good living. How should we understand that? Why shouldn’t we value them the same way we value other people?

I have someone who the society would not value, or even would insult, and then I brought him together with someone who had the opposite sense — a successful businessman and his family, driven by success and social prestige. The family has a son who takes part in memory competitions and these four characters come together into the story.

Q: What inspired “The Broken Word?”

A: I didn’t know anything about the conflicts, like many British people, and we should have known because it is a part of British history.

I read about it in some books and articles and I was struck by the conflict and the very fact that I didn’t know about it before, my own ignorance, and the social silence in Britain about this. I was struck by how extreme the conflict was, how large and how brutal it was.

Q: Why did you write it in poetry form?

A: I knew I wanted to write in a very stripped-down, a very minimal way and I wanted to be able to use line breaks to really control the way readers move through the text, very precisely. It’s very useful for the violence in that poem to have the precise control. I didn’t plan it, and I didn’t know it was waiting there to be used, but I sort of discovered it and I found my way there.

Q: You talk a lot about controlling the way readers read and about being precise. Can you elaborate on this?

A: I mean I wanted to be precise. Form and content come together. What I want to do is to have the most intense imaginable experience I can have to be realized in the words I leave on the page.

I want the reader to read through the words and have the same experience that I had. The feeling I have is that I’m building an external object that has its own prerogatives, its own charisma, its own internal energy, and it doesn’t feel personal, it doesn’t feel like self-expression.

It feels like I’m trying to help express this thing outside of me. It doesn’t feel like it comes from my first person; it feels like I’m trying to make this book exist and it’s the book that wants to exist.

When it’s very intense, it feels like I’m the wood and the book is the fire.