LOUIS de Bernieres never intended to be anything other than a poet. But his agent, passed on to him from a friend (who happened to be in the audience at the Swindon Festival of Literature), told him not to bother. She didn’t ‘get’ poetry she said dismissively, and even if she did there was no money in it anyway.

So when he broke his leg in a motorcycle accident and was immobilised for six months, he gave novel writing a try.

Twenty-six years and 12 books later (including two collections of poetry – he didn’t give up quite that easily) the author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a household name.

His latest novel The Dust That Falls From Dreams is a bit of an anomaly in his body of work. It has been 20 years in the making, in fact. He admitted it may have even been his first opus had he not got muddled up in mounds of research.

Set at the outbreak of World War One, it is inspired by his grandmother, who lost her fiancé in 1915, a tragedy that set her and her descendants’ lives off course.

“It’s not a family history in any sense,” he hastened to clarify during a Q&A with guest interviewer Janice Booth, “because I’ve realised that the art of fiction is telling as many lies as possible.”

He has grown so attached to his characters that he is already writing the novel’s next two installments - simultaneously.

“My approach is very postmodern,” he quipped. “I write whatever bit I feel like writing next.”

Dipping in and out of talk of his poetry and prose at the Art Centre, he still had time for a few choice anecdotes about his many skirmishes with the production crew behind Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which was adapted into a movie starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz.

He respectfully declined to write the script but it is fair to say he wasn’t bowled over by the finished product, particularly lines like, “I realised I couldn’t live without you,” he recited dramatically on stage, burying his head in his hands.

The scriptwriter didn’t think much of him either, he pointed out not without a tinge of humour. And neither did the director, with whom he had a heated argument on set.

Well, who are we to question de Bernieres’s methods?