“APRIL 8, 2006, the day De Niro's Game was published,” says Rawi Hage with the exactitude of someone recalling when they quit drink, or smoking. He is remembering the day that he stopped driving a taxi, while occasionally handing a business card to interested passengers describing himself as Rawi Hage, Author.

Now Hage's debut novel has capped a delirious journey from “slush pile” obscurity to winning the Dublin Impac Literary Award, which, at €100,000 (around £80,000) is the world's most lucrative literary prize. It is only the second time that a Canadian has won the Impac and the first time it has been awarded for a first book.

Hage, who is a Lebanese Christian but proclaims himself as “fluctuating between atheism and agnosticism depending on the day,” left the Eastern Beirut neighbourhood of Achrafieh, where he was raised (and his parents remain), in 1984. After working “a lot of mostly labour jobs” in New York for several years, he arrived in Canada in 1991.

“New York was a horrible experience, I'm not even sure how I survived,” Hage says. Canada, not America, had always been his first-choice destination. “The telephones were unreliable and so often I wouldn't hear from my family for months. I was in a nowhere zone - and then I heard that Quebec was accepting Lebanese because they were Francophones. I remember when I got my papers, just walking the streets and feeling secure. I was legally accepted, and that was a great feeling.”

Hage, 44, can appear wary and dour until a brimming, mischievous smile takes over and animates his face. It is the comportment of a refugee whose emigration was difficult and whose first tendency is to be disbelieving, even of himself. The morning after he was told the news of his Impac win, Hage says he paced his room frenetically and then e-mailed his publisher to ask: “It's true, right? We won the Impac? I ain't dreaming?”

Hage chose to write De Niro's Game in English, his third language after Arabic and French, the unsolicited manuscript rejected by several Canadian publishers before it was accepted by House of Anansi Press. De Niro's Game is an occasionally violent and often upsetting novel, its concomitantly beautiful language described as “filmic”, “imagistic

...immediate and exciting” in the Impac jury's citation. The book has a markedly French existentialist flavour even before the setting of the novel is transposed from Beirut to Marseilles and then Paris. It follows the twisted lives of Bassam and his friend George, a couple of alienated Beirut youths doing what they can to get by in a city upended by seven years of civil war.

It is 1982, the year that the Israelis laid siege to Lebanon's capital. Militias dominate the city: Muslims and PLO fighters in the west, and Christians and Phalangists to the east. “De Niro's Game” is the title that Bassam and his friends have given to the suicidal routine of Russian roulette that many play - a macabre homage to Michael Cimino's 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, and a barometer of just how inured living in Beirut made one to death.

“You feel invincible,” Hage says, remembering his life there. “You feel that you just won't die - everybody else will, but not you. There is always this denial. You buy food. You play soccer. The war becomes normal and you just live.”

In De Niro's Game, a cool Bassam observes his surroundings:

Ten thousand bombs had fallen and I was waiting for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood. I stood in the middle of the street and rolled a cigarette. I inhaled, exhaled, and the fumes from my mouth grew like a shield. The bombs that came my way ricocheted off it, and bounded and skipped along the sky to faraway planets.

“Personally,” Hage says, “my obsession was always to leave the country. In a very loose way there were opposed camps of thinking and always a tension between the two. Many who stayed became nationalistic and completely involved in the military and the war, and the others who wanted to leave considered cowards, or people who were not at all patriotic. Leaving Lebanon is when this whole discourse starts.”

Canada, something of a mirage in Hage's novel, is an illusory promise waved in front of Bassam by a Parisian who turns out to be a Mossad agent. He has escaped Lebanon in the immediate aftermath of the Phalangist massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, as Israeli forces looked on, and in Paris Bassam wanders the city streets not knowing what to do with himself or with the gun that war has made an essential part of his identity.

“I do not just see Bassam as an immigrant. I see him as someone who has a dark past, who has been through a war and was involved in it,” Hage says. “If you create characters who do only good, who are the victims of something and then arrive here and are saved, then you're not presenting them as humans, you're representing them as somebody to pity. I believe you should include the element of evil in every person, because it exists in every person.”

Hage will not be drawn into questions of blame concerning Lebanon because he is interested in the human more than the political condition. In his new novel, Cockroach, to be published in Canada in September, he has brought his often opprobrious scrutiny to bear on the experience of being an immigrant. Then, undoubtedly, raw truths about immigrant life will be solicited from Hage, but for now what has evidently overwhelmed the author is being, as he described himself in Thursday's acceptance speech, “one of the few wanderers who is privileged enough to have been rewarded”.

Rawi Hage will be appearing at the London Literature Festival in association with Diaspora Dialogues on Thursday, July 10 www.londonlitfest.com

De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage
Old Street, £7.99; 288pp Buy the book here

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