Read it and reap: British novelist Ross Raisin reflects on his celebrated works

Anita, a chef, uses cooking to help her think and, at other times, to help her stop thinking. How does the book's title — A Hunger — reflect the heroine's condition?

That's one for the reader to answer! The title represents something that both includes but is beyond cooking. It extends to the narrator and those around her whom she loves.

Titles are a strange thing in some ways. They are either baked in from the outset if you'll excuse the cooking pun, or they are the last piece to find. In the case of this novel, the title was the last word I wrote.

Waterline is a novel about Mick's grief after the death of his wife. He goes from being a successful tradesman to a hotel dishwasher. Tell me more about it.

Waterline is the novel I feel closest to. In part, that's because it is the most emotive concerning the gradual unravelling of a character's previous life — a kind of social loss brought about by the personal loss of his wife.

The main character, Mick, used to be a shipbuilder in an industry gradually dismantled by the state, leaving whole communities bereft. After his wife dies, he is lost, without an anchor.

Day by day, he starts to drift, first from his home, then from his country, moving itinerantly from job to job, through the precarity of the gig economy, until he winds up on the street, invisible to passers-by and even to his own children, who don't know where he is.

Readers see Mick through the eyes of the others, as a homeless person, for example. Did you use this technique to look extensively at the hero's life?

For the most part, the novel is written in a third-person mode that inhabits Mick's mind. Still, the narrative is shot through with vignettes of walk-on characters and narrative passers-by, who mostly don't notice him sitting on the pavement or by the river or, when they do, typically pay him no heed.

It is a device with which the overt aim is to shine a light on the empathetic disconnection involved in walking on by.

In your first published novel, God's Own Country, the narrator is Sam, a 19-year-old expelled from school who lives on a farm with his father. Did Sam use his own imaginary life to combat feelings of isolation?

I would say that is right. The world inside Sam's head — unpredictable, vivid, often bizarre, sometimes violent — is the world of the novel.

Sam is a young farmer who lives in a very isolated place, and his previous behaviour both at school and at home has left him excluded from the lives of others.

So, his own life is inside his head. It is a life at one with nature and with the language of the land. However, it is also a life that begins to detach more and more from the real world around him.

The other novel characters are brought into a new and increasingly dangerous connection with Sam in that detachment.

In your novel A Hunger, you wrote in detail about the kitchen. In A Natural, you wrote in detail about a footballer's life. How do you prepare before sitting down to write a novel?

When I tutor other writers, I show the importance of coalescing research and writing, of doing the two concurrently rather than separately. So, I started writing God's Own Country while on location, on the moors, while speaking to farmers and people who live on the land.

Likewise, I started writing Waterline while researching in Glasgow, visiting shipyards and charities, and speaking to those involved.

Similarly, A Natural involved going into several football clubs and speaking to the players, coaches, and youth players about what it's really like to be a professional footballer.

Then, after the first cup of tea with them, ask what it might be like to be a professional footballer who does not necessarily conform to the ideal image.

A Hunger probably draws most on my own experience. I worked in restaurants and hotels for a long time as a waiter, barman, pot-washer, and manager, and all that fed into the novel. I also soon realised that, when writing a novel about cooking, it becomes almost impossible to avoid cooking puns!

You published Read This If You Want to Be a Great Writer and teach creative writing. Do you think writers need to be mentored during the writing process?

Yes, all writers will produce better work if they are involved in a creative conversation with at least one other person. That, in essence, is what a good editor is to a writer: somebody to promulgate ideas, encourage, and give technical advice.

That is the basis of all my teaching, whether to a group or an individual – and I directly mentor several writers. I teach the entire spectrum, from young children to older children, undergraduates, postgraduates, PhD researchers, and adults, all with the same ethos: experiment, process, and encouragement.

In one of your interviews, you said you intend to make your writings "realistic". What inspires you?

I once said I intend to make my writing realistic. That isn't necessarily something I recognise or feel now. With most of my four novels, I have written in a tradition of realism, which has involved researching and imagining minutiae to give authenticity.

However, what truly inspires me is the exciting promise of each new project and its unknownness, the surprise of where the new idea might take me, which will always be different from where I have gone before.

Four successful novels, awards and recognitions on Granta's 2013 list of 20 best young novelists... Does it affect your new writing projects?

That is the most difficult question to answer.

One of the benefits of hindsight is knowing that the external recognition of prizes and related attention is, in fact, rarely related to the actual quality of your work.

As in many walks of life, those things primarily reward newness and eye-catching individuality. I certainly benefitted from that in my early years as a writer, for which I remain aware and appreciative.

I also appreciate the critical reception that my writing has always enjoyed. It is difficult, financially at least, to sustain a writing career without the oxygen of commercial success and publicity. Many writers cannot keep writing without those things or an already-feathered nest.

A difficult daily truth for me is that I have not written concertedly for the last couple of years. It's become a settled position that I've got used to.

Yet, while the days of winning awards for breakthrough novels may be over, ideas still come to me, and with those ideas, there is still the creative temptation to develop them into new stories and new, imaginative worlds.