Hugo Hamilton: 'You turn all kinds of inadequacies and awkward experiences almost into virtues by writing about them. The stuff that nobody wants to talk about is the most exciting thing for a writer'

'I have to watch my language," says Hugo Hamilton. "I have to be careful not to make mistakes." English to him is a foreign tongue. He wasn't born with it. He discovered it as a forbidden fruit, growing up in Dublin's Glasthule in a house where his father wouldn't allow the children speak anything but Irish or German – and once broke his elder brother Franz's nose for singing an English song he picked up at school.


Hamilton's mother, who met their father when she travelled to Ireland on a pilgrimage in 1949, spoke to him only in German. "Because my English was learned so late and my syntax was all wrong when I was a child, I always felt that it was full of mistakes, and it was. I said things that sounded really stupid, and I still find myself occasionally doing that."


The strangeness of English and the fact that he had to take possession of it and make it his own – like Joseph Conrad or Tom Stoppard – has enriched his writing and made him unique among his contemporaries, an Irish writer in English who is outside the Anglo-Irish literary tradition. He has been acclaimed internationally for his novels, and his haunting 2003 memoir The Speckled People – confronting the contradictions of his childhood and confusions about identity – won France's Prix Femina Etranger and Italy's Premio Giuseppe Berto.


"A lot of Irish literature comes from wonderful mistakes that happened between the Irish language and English language, and I think Irish people incorporate these mistakes really well into their conversations," Hamilton says. "They're confident in them, whereas I feel I need to conquer the language and be very cautious about it."


He remembers as a small boy getting into trouble for finding a photograph of a sailor in his father's drawer. It was a grandfather he never knew who didn't speak Irish and died at 28 while serving in the royal navy, an embarrassment to his Irish nationalist father who never mentioned him. "But he didn't throw out the photograph. You can't ditch your family. He just hid it away. That's what we often do. We hide away stuff and do ourselves a terrible injustice by doing that. I ended up by doing that myself too. I hid away my German-ness for a long time and pretended that I was Irish. I tried to be as Irish as possible. So in a lot of ways I denied my own mother."


He's written about this in The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006). "My mother at one stage comes down to the harbour where I am working and I run away because I don't want to be linked to this woman who is German. I think that it's a terrible thing that she's thrust on me, this German-ness and the guilt of the Nazi years. But you find that you can't hide those things away."


His mother would dress him in German leather trousers – or lederhosen – while his father made him wear Aran sweaters. Neighbourhood children would shout 'Sieg Heil' and 'Achtung' when they saw him, and once put him on trial as Eichmann. The irony was that his mother's family stood against the Nazis. Her uncle was ousted as mayor of Kempen for refusing to join the party.


"The way they saw my mother was exotic because she looked different and had a different way of dressing and spoke with this lovely German accent. They partly saw her as a film star but also were threatened by her. Although she was very generous towards people, they saw her as a snob. It was just that they didn't understand her."


He secretly taught himself English because he didn't want to be different. "I desperately wanted to belong on the street and to be as Irish as those people out there. They were authentic and I always felt that we were not authentic. The Irish language didn't really sound authentic. And being German was definitely not authentic. So I tried to be like the others."


It's not that he didn't grow up in a happy home. His mother created a warm ambience, singing songs and telling stories of her childhood and baking cakes as her mother had in Germany. "But then we discovered that we were in the wrong country. That's not what everybody else was experiencing. It was like being in exile. I remember running out in the street and I didn't know what people were saying. At one stage, builders came in to build an extension at the back. I didn't know what they were talking about. They were like foreigners. All I knew from my father was that whenever I repeated of their words, there was trouble."


When he was seven, in 1960, the family went for the first time to Germany. "I knew it intimately from my mother's stories. It was very much like coming home or walking into a film, a piece of fiction. It was extraordinary to suddenly come into a country where all the people spoke in German. It was like a country of aunts and uncles to me, a huge family. I thought 'this is where I belong, this is my country'. All my mother's sisters came to see her, and my father was happy because this is where he married her. You could see people embracing each other, in tears, and looking at us and asking our names. And I feel this whenever I am in Germany. It makes me feel I'm back there with my mother. It's still a powerful longing."


Holidays in Connemara evoked a somewhat similar feeling of being home. "I felt my father was really happy and would never be angry again. He was able to show my mother the real Ireland where they were all speaking Irish. In some ways I was involved in this contest between my parents. She had this huge strange culture on one hand, and he was on the other side trying to prove the Irish had exactly the same strong culture. I think the stereotypes were turned round in my household. My father was strong and ideological and probably trying to be what he thought was the perfect husband for a German woman, and she was always very human and trying to be the perfect Irish woman to fit in. And I was caught in the middle."


He went into hiding, living in his imagination. "It was the only escape for me. So probably that's where my need for fiction began." His mother had a typewriter on which she'd write things about her life, like a diary. "It was exciting to see her. She was a great story-teller." So he began typing on it. Soon he was making up his own stories, a re-imagined world. "It was a way of making sense of everything. That's the great thing about writing. You turn all kinds of inadequacies and awkward experiences almost into virtues by writing about them. You turn them into wonderfully interesting things to look at. The stuff that nobody wants to talk about is the most exciting thing for a writer. That's very much the case with me. All the stuff I couldn't tell anyone because they'd laugh at me became the stuff I'm obsessed with, this constant feeling of not belonging, of being in between."


After school, he worked as a copy boy in the Irish Press, and began writing articles both in Irish and in English. David Marcus published his story 'The Suspicion of Guilt' in New Irish Writing, and 'Goodbye to the Hurt Mind' was one of the first stories published in New Irish Writing in the Sunday Tribune when the page found a new home there in 1988. By then he no longer signed himself Sean O hUrmoltaigh but, using his Confirmation name, signed his work 'Hugo Hamilton.' He was working in Gael Linn but had taken a year off to concentrate on writing. With his wife Mary Rose's encouragement and although they had two small daughters, he quit his job. "Writing from the beginning had to be something I could give myself to full-time."


Faber published his first novel Surrogate City in 1990, having already included 'The Suspicion of Guilt' in Faber Introductions. "The experience of an Irish person in Germany meeting an Irish girl who's pregnant with somebody else's child is almost another way of telling the kind of confusions I have about identity. I was born in a time when identity was really important in the world. Germany had just come out of the biggest identity battle in history in which they erased people for their identity, and we were replaying all that in Northern Ireland with street kerbs coloured according to your identity. But we have to remember that identity is a construction, it is a fiction."


All his novels have been an attempt to tell his story in different ways, whether in The Last Shot, where a young American living in Germany sets out to find the location of the last shot fired in the war, or The Love Test, which encapsulates Germany's recent history through the story of a troubled marriage. Headbangers, and its follow-up Sad Bastard, featuring a tough Dublin cop, a Dirty Harry, was "an attempt to prove that I was Irish, that I could laugh at myself in a story about Ireland and place myself there. It was a platform for me to go forward and write The Speckled People."


He lives in Dun Laoghaire, not far from where he grew up. "I got married here. I've family here. Life just takes over. You walk into the future. You begin to belong to the place where your children go to school. My mother used say 'home is where the postman brings the letters'."


Which language is he most at home in? "For a long time I would have said, only in English, because there was a kind of prohibition on the other languages. Irish was not cool, so I kind of denied the Irish language for a while. I also for years denied being German and denied the German language. But then, writing The Speckled People, I began to acknowledge my German-ness. Now I've come to a state where the German language is almost level again with my English and also Irish. The strange thing is that we did grow to love the Irish language. That was the one thing my father achieved."


In his latest novel Disguise – perhaps his most imaginative exploration yet of German-ness and lost identity – a two-year-old foundling is given to a young mother who has lost her child in the Berlin bombings and grows up thinking of himself as a Jew. "Whether you can believe him or not is almost the wrong question to ask. He's based on a man I met in Berlin in 1974 who did exactly that. It's really a very German thing for somebody to recreate themselves as a Jewish survivor. His life is almost like a monument to the victims of Nazism."


Hamilton's father never lived to see him published in English. Would he have refused to acknowledge stories, perhaps hidden them away in a drawer along with the photograph of the sailor of which he was so ashamed? "I think he would have felt a sense of pride, but also a sense of threat. He was supportive of the idea that I would write. He wanted to be a writer himself. He had changed. He relaxed all his rules. I think he realised he had made mistakes. But as a personal relationship with him, it came too late."


Maybe that's part of what drives Hamilton to write. "In writing, I can eventually have this conversation with him that I couldn't have when he was alive."