Everyone who rings the bell outside peers in at us as they wait for a reply but few, I suspect, would recognise Matthew Kneale’s big, slightly solemn face and balding head, even though they may know his name. Despite the hullabaloo surrounding his 2000 Whitbread win, he has kept a low profile on the literary scene, living in Rome – “just because I like it there” – with his Canadian partner and their two small children.It’s quickly obvious that he’s not a natural at interviews and would much rather be back in the Eternal City. Does he hate talking about his books, I ask? “No,” he replies without conviction. “It makes a nice change.” We both laugh out loud at what he’s just said. Happily it releases the tension.”There is something about writing,” he reflects, relaxing a little bit, “that means you are always training yourself to be bad at the interview thing.

It’s because you’re training yourself as a writer to be able to be very focused in a quiet room on a world that doesn’t exist. If you learn to do it successfully, one measurement of your success is that you get steadily less good at performing in public.”The son of two celebrated writers – Judith Kerr, creator for children of the Mog series and The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and Nigel Kneale, originator of the 1950s radio series Quatermass and its film spin-offs – it seemed the natural thing for Matthew Kneale to become a writer himself “I had it easy,” he admits. “If your parents are writers, they can’t tell you not to go into writing. Just hearing a typewriter tapping away at home all the time made it seem a practical way to live.”He won critical plaudits but no great recognition with his three early novels Whore Banquets (later renamed Mr Foreigner), Inside Rose’s Kingdom and Sweet Thames Then English Passengers changed everything Its acclaim, he says, has given him confidence as a writer. Confidence to try something new?”Well, I’m not sure Small Crimes is so very different,” he suggests There are many points of continuity.

Both, for example, combine humour with seriousness of purpose to good effect in terms of readability Both reflect their author’s fascination with travel. The bug has been with Kneale since he left Oxford with a history degree in 1982 and bought a plane ticket to Japan. One of his book jackets boasted that he had so far visited 83 countries on seven continents. Only the arrival of small children has slowed down his progress. Travel is, he says, “a good way of getting away from sitting in a quiet room somewhere trying to write something”.Technically, too, there are similarities between the two books “English Passengers was a novel of separate elements I felt each had to work as a kind of short story Or as a short story with a cliffhanger And I regard Small Crimes in some ways as a novel. There is certainly a linking theme about the spoiltness of the West in relation to far away countries I wanted it to have the emotional structure of a novel.