Click here to download a complete story 'Cartagena' from his new book. This content is intended for mature audiences.

You have just won the Dylan Thomas prize - awarded for creative talent in writers under 30 - and you've been nominated for the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35". How does it feel to be winning literary awards already?

It’s unexpected and flattering and humbling. And a bit of a head trip too. Expectations are so low for short story collections that any attention at all is somewhat shocking. With both these things, I was mainly stoked to be included on shortlists of such high calibre. Of course, the youth thing is double-edged; I think I speak for most “young” writers when I say that we’d like our work to be judged not provisionally or for evidence of promise – but solely on its merits. The only thing worse, it sometimes seems, than being praised for achievement despite youth is being forgiven failure because of it.

You trained as a lawyer before turning to writing. When did you know you wanted to write?

I was always a reader, and that activity spilled over into writing. In primary school, I read everything I could get my hands on: children’s books, novels, comics, fairy tales, etc. In high school I started focusing on reading and writing poetry. At university I dabbled in journalism, then after uni – during a backpacking year – I started a novel. I finished it while working in a law firm about a year later. Although I subsequently chucked that novel out, it did get me admitted into the masters program at Iowa, which is where I found the time and stimulus to write the stories in The Boat.

What is it about the short story that you like as opposed to poetry and novels?

Of course poetry can be narrative, and novels poetic, but generally the two forms move language through different elements. Short stories, to my mind, are suited to transition between these elements. A short story can do everything a novel can do – except be long. Conversely, a short story is arguably better suited than a novel to adopt poetic logics such as compression, ellipticism, associativeness, metaphorical charge, etc. In this way, even though short stories are shorter than novels, I like their capaciousness. They can tell a story whilst simultaneously claiming poetry’s prerogative to communicate before it means. I like that everything – including mistakes – is accentuated in short stories; that readers need to be persuaded to fall deeper, even though they know the end is near; all this makes the stakes higher.

The first story in your collection is intentionally semi-autobiographical and the rest are about places and protagonists that bear little resemblance to you or your background. Do you think it is important for a writer to retain anonymity?

I was watching David Simon, creator of the top-notch TV show The Wire, talking about this. He said that his ideal was for real-life crackheads to vouch for the “realism” of his TV crackheads, real-life cops his fictional cops. I remember thinking that that was a terrific fidelity to which he hewed, but that it (modestly) understated the complications of verisimilitude, of artifice and authenticity. Also, it didn’t go far enough. You don’t want only crackheads to recognise themselves in the portrayal of a fictional crackhead – you want everyone to recognise themselves. You need to preserve that space between identification and empathy that gives fiction its moral purpose. David Simon knows this – which is why his show’s so good.

From a technical point of view, I strongly believe in both T.S. Eliot’s stern call for authors’ extinction of personality as well as Flaubert’s cavalier “Madame Bovary? C’est moi!” I’m not sure where that situates me in relation to this question.

Which character in The Boat was the most challenging to get into the mind of, and why?

I guess, strangely enough, the most challenging character to enter was that of “Nam” in the first story. As anyone who’s read the book will be able to tell, I’m actually pretty predisposed against self-consciousness in writing – so it was quite hard for me to stick a character with my name and many of my circumstances front and centre in that story.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy