We may still only be at the shortlist stage (it was announced last week), but the 2007 Man Booker prize has already thrown up several surprises – JM Coetzee and a bunch of big names cast aside, a clutch of literary unknowns thrust into the limelight.

Of all the surprises to date, though, none is more intriguing than those surrounding Lloyd Jones. Almost unheard of in Britain, this genial, modest 52-year-old journalist and writer from New Zealand suddenly finds his seventh novel, Mister Pip, not only on the shortlist but also leading the pack as the bookies’ favourite, ahead even of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.

Previously Jones had only managed to get one novel, Biografi, published in Britain. Now he is such a hot favourite to win the country’s ultimate literary award that the bookmakers briefly stopped taking bets on him last week.

Jones himself, sitting at breakfast the morning after the shortlist announcement, cannot explain the sudden interest – “I was hoping that you would tell me,” he says. But he is not totally overwhelmed by the fuss, having already got used to it back home in Wellington, where the press seized on the huge advances he got from around the world for Mister Pip and dubbed the book the country’s first $1m novel.

Great expectations for the writer from nowhere

Andrew Holgate talks to Lloyd Jones the surprise favourite who could pip Ian McEwan to the prestigious prize

BACKGROUND

• The tide that runs through the Booker

• Unknown has great Booker expectations

• No certainties as judges pick interesting list

• McEwan could be pipped to Booker

• 13 novels make Booker’s dozen

BACKGROUND

• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

• The Gathering by Anne Enright

• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker

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Haunting and morally complex, the novel deserves its place on the list and would make a worthy winner. Set on the real-life island of Bougainville in 1991 at the start of Papua New Guinea’s bloody 10-year civil war, it tells the story of the only white on the island, the tall, eccentric, pop-eyed Mr Watts, who takes over a village school when the teacher flees and starts tutoring his young charges using Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations as his only text. As the children become entranced by the book, and by him, so clashes arise, first with some local mothers, and then – more seriously – with government troops hunting rebels.

Much of the politics of Mister Pip, and in particular its chilling violence, is based on real-life events that Jones heard about as a journalist when he was investigating the war between the Papua New Guinea government and island rebels seeking independence. Failing to get inside the country during the worst of the troubles – “a bloody good thing, as it turned out, as I would have been killed for sure” – Jones instead found himself sailing up the coast on a steamboat, talking to a beer-drinking off-duty soldier from the Papua New Guinea defence force.

The stories that came out during the conversation – about government helicopters dumping rebels out at sea or dropping them into the forest from a great height – fed into the book. “I’ve flown over those forests in a helicopter and they’re the most awesome things – giant trees shooting 200ft to 300ft up in the air.”

His subsequent research on the island threw up even worse stories of rape, torture and mutilation. “Shocking things happened there over that 10-year period, just unbelievable,” he says.

Jones, born in a dormitory suburb of Wellington, is a practical, down-to-earth writer, who sees no real difference between his novel writing and his journalism. Such level-headedness probably comes from his background. His father was a gold prospector and welder, his mother a typist. Both left school at 12.

“Having a family was their greatest achievement,” he explains.

Remarkably, both parents (they are now dead) were also orphans, a fact that has had a huge impact on Jones and has coloured Mister Pip, where questions about absent relatives, departures and new beginnings dominate. A couple of years ago he went to Pembroke Dock in southwest Wales in search of one possible relative. The trip was not a huge success.

“I was so bloody distressed by the shallow end of the gene pool I sprang from there that I gave up the ghost and fled. I kept seeing my father everywhere, kind of baldheaded, round-shouldered. It was like looking in a mirror.” A trip to Taunton in search of his mother’s side of the family threw up even more unsettling connections: a cousin who “looked different to her but sounded exactly the same and had all the same mannerisms”.

As for the writing bug, Jones got that after reading politics at university in Wellington. Travelling round America on a Greyhound bus in an attempt to kick-start his literary education, he ended up in a hotel in Schenectady, upstate New York, and spent several months writing. “It was a dosshouse full of ex-Vietnam vets on all kinds of amphetamines prowling the hallways at night, and little old men waiting to die.”

It was the writers he discovered there – Hemingway, Bellow, Sontag, plus Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff – rather than any British novelists (including Dickens, strangely), who have been the biggest influence on his career: “What the Americans taught me is that less is more and that you should leave space for the reader.”

A self-confessed rugby nut – one of his novels, Book of Fame, tells the story of the legendary 1905 All Blacks tour – Jones can now look forward to a possible dream double this autumn: him winning the Man Booker, his beloved All Blacks lifting the World Cup.

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