Two stories this past fortnight on the contemporary pitfalls of any sudden and unexpected literary triumph: last year Doris Lessing, the now 88-year-old author of 50 novels, volumes of short stories, memoirs and plays, won the Nobel Prize. Last night she talked on Radio 4's Front Row about the effect of that win. It had constituted a “bloody disaster”. “All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed,” she said. Her writing, meanwhile, “has stopped, I don't have any energy any more. This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me - don't imagine you'll have it for ever: use it while you've got it because it'll go, it's sliding away like water down the plughole.”

But young writers who “use it” today face the identical problem as Lessing: the greater the accolade, the more demanding the publicity machine. When, in 1999, 20-year-old Richard Mason published The Drowning People, he became the focus of one of the book industry's biggest hype campaigns. He had secured a two-book deal for £100,000 and his book eventually sold more than 5 million copies. “On a publicity tour in Rome, I remember staying in a lovely hotel, being driven around in a sleek car. People were grabbing me and I had to smile, when all I wanted was to be alone...Writing had come spontaneously to me. It had been what made me me and, suddenly, I was judged.”

The pressure did nothing for Mason's bipolar depression. The completion of his second novel, Us, took almost a decade. Compare this with 1974 when Martin Amis, then 24, won the Somerset Maugham Award for The Rachel Papers. “The event passed,” Amis wrote in Experience, “in what now seems to be improbable tranquillity. No interviews, no readings, no photo sessions.”

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