Living up to his storytelling name

Rawi Hage carried his novel, 'De Niro's Game', around in his head for 20 years, from civil war in Beirut to New York and then to Canada. He finally let it out, and it survived the dreaded publisher's slush pile. Yesterday it won the 2008 International Impac Dublin Literary Award. He talks to Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent

EVEN IF YOUR first novel has already won several major literary prizes in Canada, and has been short-listed for a number of others; even if the critics have praised it, compared you with Hemingway, and your much-anticipated second novel is about to be published; even if your head is full of other stories just waiting to be written, it is still difficult not to seem slightly shocked on winning the biggest fiction trophy of all.

Lebanese-Canadian Rawi Hage admits to being as delighted as he is jet-lagged. He has a quiet, intense, slightly courtly manner - Old World despite his shaved head and his sportswear. His heavy black running shoes squeeze sighs from the carpet. When he puts on his buff-coloured baseball cap, his large, haunted eyes consume his face.

Suddenly he looks a bit like a younger, slightly more robust Paul Simon.

He slumps wearily down into the armchair and begins to tell his story, which is very different to the fraught hell experienced by Bassam, the narrator of De Niro's Game. Before we begin, his publisher, Lynn Henry of Anansi, Toronto, aware that Hage is a quiet man who tends to respond to questions without volunteering much information, says: "I think it may be useful to mention that back home, in Canada, Rawi is a very well-known photographer and artist." His writing began when he was asked for notes to accompany exhibition pieces.

It proves a valuable intervention. Rawi Hage may be surprised but he is no rookie - he is an accomplished visual artist. And his powerful visual sense informs his novel. As for the story, he says, "It was in my head for 20 years, I never spoke about it. Finally, it wanted to come out." De Niro's Gamepulsates with the urgency of the moment. "It's very complex, the situation in Lebanon . . . there are lots of different interests. And, you know, there is nothing worse than civil war. At least other wars tend to unite a people, but a civil war is most savage; it destroys a country, it divides families."

Born in Beirut into a Christian family "living in a Christian neighbourhood", Hage, who turned 44 in April, is the second Arab to win the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. However, Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun's magnificent This Blinding Absence of Light, which won in 2004, was written in French and translated into English. Hage wrote his novel in English, his third language, and mentions in passing that the French translation is "very beautiful . . . the Arab translation needed some work" he pauses, and mentions that there are two French versions - one for Canada, the other for France - both done by the same translator.

Where did the book come from? "Mostly, my imagination." Are there any writers in his family? "Three. Three of my uncles are journalist-poets.

"Books were always important. I have to thank my father, he filled my life with books. He didn't write but he always read. He was a merchant, he filled the store with cigarette smoke and his friends, all talking about books and politics. It was bad for business. He dealt in women's clothing, but the women were intimidated. They didn't like to come into the shop; my mother had to take over."

Hage is the second of four sons. "At home we spoke Arabic; at school we did the material through French." He was good at football and had been selected for the national youth team. "But the war happened and all of that, the football, ended." De Niro's Gameis set largely in Beirut. The city, beaten and depressed, still haunted by its former glories, dominates the book.

Bassam, the narrator, is a disengaged youth whose childhood and now life has been ransacked by the war. He is angry, disengaged and Hage, who admits to understanding the anger, refers to having spent most of his youth reading the classics his father owned. "Balzac, Zola, Molière, mostly French. Later when I got to New York, I read all the Russians, Turgenev, Gogol, in translation. It helped my English. But the first influence for me as a writer was the Arabic poetry, it is very beautiful."

HAGE'S ENGLISH is well established, as is his sense of being Canadian. "I'm a Canadian citizen, I'm Canadian. It wasn't hard, we [in Canada] are a multicultural society, particularly in Montreal where I live." Canada is supporting him as a writer and Hage is yet another literary voice to have become part of what is an all embracing native and international tradition, combining Canadian-born writers and others who have come from elsewhere and settled there. I have to admit that while reading De Niro's Game, I never thought about Canada - because the narrative evokes the shattered streets of Beirut where the bombs always fall in pairs.

It is a place from which the wealthy were fleeing. As Bassam notes in the novel: "The rich were leaving for France and letting their dogs roam loose on the streets: orphan dogs, expensive dogs, potty-trained dogs, dogs with French names and red bowties, fluffy dogs, well-bred dogs, china dogs, genetically modified dogs, and incestuous dogs that clung to each other in packs, covered the streets in tens, and gathered under the command of a charismatic three legged mutt. The most expensive pack of wild dogs roamed Beirut and the earth, and howled to the big moon, and ate from mountains of garbage on the corners of our streets." It is one of the sequences in which Hage allows his black humour freedom to simmer - he smiles at this and says there are jokes in De Niro's Gamethat will make a Middle Eastern reader laugh, subtle bits of word play, street slang. He smiles and admits "my new book [Cockroach, which is due out in August] is funnier, far blacker." But De Niro's Gamehad to be written. "I started it as a short story, but it kept growing."

The violence is graphic, lives are destroyed in seconds. In the novel, the narrator's mother had a sudden brutal death in a bomb blast. He also makes wonderful use of Camus' L'Étrangerand its main character, Meursault, pondering the news of his mother's death. I feel wary of asking Hage did something horrific befall his mother in Beirut; while I am trying to shape the question, he explains that his parents now live in Canada as does one of his brothers. A second is settled in New York, while a third, having studied in Canada, returned to Beirut. When his mother read De Niro's Gameshe said: "Son, you have a lot of imagination."

Although Hage suffered none of the physical pain described in the novel, he spoke last night in his acceptance speech of how his mother had saved him by "making me hide under the table" during bombs. He speaks of the "psychological damage". What is it like, living in a war? "Tension, always tension. But the good thing is that it can make small acts of solidarity. Neighbours become friends and it makes a community, but . . . " his voice trails away. He hated it. Like Bassam, who says he wants to leave Beirut to "its devils", Hage left.

"First I went to New York, I was 20. The war had begun when I was 11, it took my childhood, I had nine years of the war. Then I left." Arriving in New York with no qualification, he had many jobs.

"I was a waiter, I worked in a warehouse, but then I met a Lebanese photographer, he asked me to be his assistant. The first time I saw a picture emerging from the fluid, I fell in love. I wanted to do this." During the 18 months he spent working with the Lebanese photographer, he learned about the technical side of photography. His new skills helped him find commercial work.

His new life in New York changed when war suddenly broke out in Iran; he was insulted by strangers who saw him as an Iranian. It was an earlier version of what was to happen after 9/11. Neither Hage nor his publisher are exact about when he finally moved to Canada. He says it was easier to stay in Canada as the emigration laws are less repressive than the US.

"I speak French, so it was easy for me to settle in Montreal." He took a Fine Arts degree at Concordia, one of the two universities in Montreal. "It was a four-year course," he says and it is obvious that it was a very important period for him.

So after 20 years of being "at the back of mind", the book happened. "I wrote it, quickly, all at once - no sample - and sent it off." The manuscript arrived at Anansi, an independent literary publisher in Toronto. Its list includes Margaret Atwood, AL Kennedy, Tim Lilburn and Shani Mootoo, who was born in Ireland and grew up in Trinidad. Mootoo's second novel, He Drown She in the Sea, was longlisted for the Impac award.

Anansi's Lynn Henry recalls how De Niro's Gameemerged from the "slush" pile. "It was unsolicited; there was no agent. It's very unusual for a novel to get published like this; publishers don't tend to take a book that came out of nowhere, particularly a first novel. But we did and well, we're thrilled," she says with typical Canadian understatement. "While it has done well in Britain, and both the English and French editions were hugely successful in Canada, it has been fairly quiet in the US. But I guess the prize will change that. I think the new book is as good, even better, but maybe I shouldn't be saying that."

IN HAGE'S beautiful acceptance speech, he referred to his childhood as having been "marked by the geographical and sectarian divide of a nation at war". Does he see peace as a possibility for Lebanon, a country that has been battered by so many intruders and for so long? Hage sighs the resigned sigh common to people who are used to being asked for easy answers about the chances of solving an ongoing conflict. "It would require so much determination by all of the interests involved . . . " There is no easy answer.

Speaking about having written from the Christian point of view, he says: "that is the one into which I was born. But Christian, Muslim," he shrugs, "it is so unfortunate that religion is seen as an identity." Writing his first book gave him the key to write. But, he says, "I was already an artist; if I make images or pictures, or write stories, it doesn't matter. As long as I am creating, it will be right for me."

It is dark outside, but Dublin's summer evening remains busy. One final question: Rawi, his name, what does it mean in Arabic? "No one has ever asked me," he smiles, a boy's smile: "It seems so obvious, but I will tell you. It means 'storyteller'."

De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage is published by Old Street Publishing, £7.99.

Eileen Battersby reviews the book in Weekend Review tomorrow