Q&A: JOHN BOYNE, back with his first children's book since ' The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,talks to EOIN BUTLER

What kind of a school kid were you?I went to Terenure College, which is very much a rugby school. But I was always more of an arty kid. My mother used to bring me down to Dundrum public library once a week and, I suppose, that was where I fell in love with books.

What did you like to read?I loved the Bobby Brewster books by HE Todd. It was about a little boy and, in each story, inanimate objects would come to life.

At what stage did you try your hand at writing?In my teenage years I studied English in Trinity and Creative Writing in the University of East Anglia. I was always writing stories and sending them off places, hoping to have them published. When I was about 20, I got a letter from Ciaran Carty in the Tribune telling me that one of my short stories was going to be published. It was so exciting.

To support yourself in the early years you also worked in Waterstones bookshop in Dublin. Yes, that exposed me to an awful lot of contemporary writers like JG Ballard and Julian Barnes that I hadn't come across in college. Also, there were Irish authors like Roddy Doyle and Colum McCann who would often come in to do signings. Seeing all of those new books coming in, week after week, made me realise that someone had to write them. And perhaps it wasn't insane to think it could be me.

You weren't the only aspiring writer working there in the mid-1990s.No. At the time, people like Sarah Webb, Paul Murray and Cormac Kinsella were all working there. It was a very creative environment. There was a sense that we all had ambition and we weren't messing around.

I presume Waterstones was keeping an eye on you.By the sounds of it, half its staff would have been surreptitiously doodling away at their debut novels. To be honest, I did used to write a bit when I was there. You'd go up to the top floor in the evenings when it was quiet. I wrote a good portion of my first and second novels up there.

By the time you left in 2003, you already had two novels published.By then, I was managing the shop. We had a staff of 40 and, to be honest, I wasn't enjoying it any more. It had become less about the books and more about man management – which perhaps wasn't my strongest card. The first two novels hadn't sold particularly well and, I suppose, I decided I either wanted to be a writer or I didn't. It was a drunken, spur of the moment decision. I decided on a Sunday, quit the same day, and was living in Wexford by the end of the week.

Most of your novels are historical. Have you ever made any egregious errors, like having the tsar receive a text message from one of his generals?Nothing as extreme as that. But I often get letters from people saying this is wrong, or that is wrong. Very often I'll know myself when something isn't 100 per cent accurate. But you have to have a certain freedom when you're writing a work of fiction. In The House of Special Purpose, I could put the tsar in places and situations that weren't strictly accurate. But I couldn't have him land there on a plane.

'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas',which is set in the Holocaust, was criticised by some Jewish groups for historical inaccuracies. The criticisms of that book were off the mark, I thought, because it was a fable. It wasn't set in the real world. The moment you place a historical character in the real world, it's already corrupted. I'm open to criticism – but I reject this criticism.

Tell us about your new book 'Noah Barleywater Runs Away'. It's a children's book. We don't know what Noah is running away from at first, but we discover it as the novel progresses. It's something important that doesn't happen to every child, but it does happen to some children, and every child knows someone it happens to.

I wanted to write something serious but I didn’t want to write something with a great historical tragedy at its core, because that would be quite cynical.

Not to be rude, but isn't that what you did with 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'?No, I mean, because I'd done that before, and done that in a completely non-cynical way, if I'd decided to go on and do another book in that vein – if I'd decided to set it around 9/11, say – that just wouldn't sit right with me.

Noah Barleywater Runs Awayis published by Random House on Thursday