The success of the debut, The Harmony Silk Factory, established Aw on the literary cocktail circuit. He accepted every festival invitation and undertook a publicity tour of four continents.

'After years of just sitting in my room scribbling away, suddenly people said: Do you want to come to Rome or Stockholm? Of course I said yes. It seemed an extraordinary privilege to be paid to travel somewhere to talk about my work,' Aw says.

His solitary life of literature and his creative writing studies at Britain's University of East Anglia had not prepared Aw for the duties of the modern published author. Standing in front of audiences triggered tension that could only be burned off by seeking out writers and publishing types to socialise with afterwards. He spent six months talking to thousands of people about literature when he should have been creating some more.

'I had started the second novel but couldn't get it going,' he says. 'I'd start and then slip back so far that I'd have to restart all over again. It was very frustrating.'

Aw argues that the only way to learn how to write is to read novels. For much of 2005 though, all he could think about was reading Silk Factory's reviews. 'That was time not well spent. I'd spent so many years scribbling away in private, I wanted external validation. Everyone does. So I read all my reviews. Really, it's not something that writers should concern themselves with. It doesn't add anything to your work.

'If reviews are bad they can be quite upsetting. And just because somebody says your work is good doesn't mean you're any better a writer for it. The next book you work on faces the same kind of difficulties as always. Just because you get a few good reviews doesn't mean you're necessarily in a position to write a good novel.'

Aw extracted himself from the publishing world and returned to writing a second novel at his flat in London. He was unable to avoid a publicity tour for Map of the Invisible World - he is on the road for even longer this time. But he has learned to use the road to avoid reviews and perhaps even write the third novel.

'I'm much happier about it and much more chilled out,' he says at his hotel overlooking Sydney Harbour during a gap between dreaded readings.

'I'm not going out all night with writers. In the evenings I might just have an early night of reading or scribbling some notes down. I'm finding it less traumatic.

'My friends have convinced me that we writers who tour are the lucky ones. I know that I'm talking to people who want to hear my work and that it's a good thing.'

All he will say about the third novel is that, like the first two, it 'concerns Southeast Asianness'.

'It's basically about Southeast Asians who go to China to seek fame and fortune.'

Silk Factory used Malaysia in the second world war as the backdrop for the life of Johnny Lim, a poor boy who finds wealth via communism and collaboration with the Japanese occupiers. Told from the points of view of Lim's wife, his son and a Briton, the novel shows that history is just perception.

Invisible World explores a nation's turning point. As President Sukarno attempts to erase Indonesia's colonial history, Aw's characters - an anthropologist, artist, CIA spy, South China Morning Post journalist and children - are cut off from old expectations.

The central character, Adam, is a teenaged orphan raised by Karl, a Dutch artist with a passion for an independent Indonesia. When Karl is arrested, the boy flees his island to seek help from Margaret, an American friend of his father in Jakarta. To find Karl, she employs her contacts in US intelligence and the media and calls in old credits to arrange a meeting with Sukarno.

'I'm interested, I think - in so far as a writer is conscious of what they are interested in - in Southeast Asia and people and moments of great change,' says Aw.

'I'm interested in times of enormous social, cultural and political change. The 60s were a time when Southeast Asian countries were newly independent after several hundred years of colonialism. The pre-war structures were collapsing around the world and it was very much the start of the cold war.

'You just felt as if social orders were collapsing and restructuring themselves. We were all finally free, in inverted commas. It struck me that Malaysia and Indonesia had really different paths through independence and the early years of independence. Indonesia's was incredibly violent, very bloody and turbulent and Malaysia's was relatively calm, in so far as these things can be calm.

'That got me thinking about what we do, collectively or individually, with freedom and how we restructure ourselves.'

While Aw spent his childhood in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Britain, Indonesia has been a constant presence. His father has worked as an engineer in the country for 25 years.

'I never actually lived in Indonesia but I've been there on visits since my early teens and I feel I know it very well. Growing up in Malaysia in the 70s and 80s you lived in the shadow of Indonesia. You got all their television, their soap operas, their music and we share a language.

'It's untapped in terms of English literature. There's a fair bit of Dutch colonial literature but that's of a certain kind. There's a lot of fantastic writing in Indonesian, which, very frustratingly, isn't translated into English. There are a lot of great Indonesian writers, especially poets. But in terms of English it was a challenge for me. I knew there was not much at all in terms of English-language literature - the great exception being Christopher Koch's famous The Year of Living Dangerously.'

The lack of literary leads allowed Aw's novel to trust in his experience. He came to Hong Kong to speak to family friend Judith Sihombing, an Australian who lived in Indonesia in the 1960s. She was the starting point for the character Margaret.

'She's nothing like Margaret in most ways except in the fact that she must have been incredibly courageous. The 60s were very turbulent and Jakarta, even today, is not the easiest city to be in. For a single Caucasian woman to roam the streets of Jakarta doing exactly what she wanted, I found that very exciting. I really like the idea of a slightly diminutive foreign woman cutting a swathe through this big, teeming city, which on the surface is very masculine.'

If Indonesian publishers and writers are looking for a wider audience, Aw is perhaps the ideal flag waver for the cause. Malaysian literature has prospered since Silk Factory was released, with Preeta Samarasan and Tan Twan Eng joining Rani Manicka in an accomplished salon of scribes with international publishing deals and prizes.

'There's definitely a thriving literary culture in Malaysia,' he says. 'It's exciting. Its success is not just measured in international publication. It's also measured in how well you write for local readers.

'In the last three or four years there have been four or five [Malaysian] writers. We're all in our 30s, we're all from a normal, middle-class, educated background - nothing extraordinary. That's why I'm quite optimistic. Because it means that somewhere along the line the education system must have worked. This augurs very well for the younger generation.

'But there's a lot of interest in us as writers and how to become writers without really realising how to become a writer,' he says.

'I'm a fervent believer that all good writing comes from reading and you can't really become a writer of any note at all unless you've read an enormous amount.'

Writer's notes

Name: Tash Aw Age: 37 Born: Taipei, to Malaysian parents. Lived in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong as a child. Moved to England at 18, studied law and worked as a lawyer for four years Lives: London Work: The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best debut novel; Map of the Invisible World (2009) Next project: a third novel, partly set in China What the papers say about Map of the Invisible World: 'Aw's words flow with the apparent effortlessness of water over pebbles that eddies occasionally to draw our gaze deeper.' The Star (Malaysia) 'Aw has a fine understanding ... of the limitations of the swaths of historical or cultural information that can seem a prerequisite for novels that describe distant places or times ... Aw's characteristic tone is a fine lyricism that, at its best, owes something to Michael Ondaatje or Anne Michaels.' The Daily Telegraph