Acceptance Speech for the David Cohen British Literature Prize for a lifetime's achievement in writing, 1998.

I am honoured and delighted. Thank you very much indeed.

In the quite brief time of this splendid prize's existence it has become something of a tradition for the recipient to speak a little about his or her writing life. Thinking about that, I wondered where and when mine had begun. Strictly speaking, I suppose, it was in a small schoolroom in Skibbereen when, as an alternative to parsing and analysis, I was occasionally required to compose six sentences on such random subjects as 'A Wet Afternoon' or 'A Day in the Life of a Dog.' I did my best in that respect, but even at seven I believe I probably guessed that there was more to words and what you did with them than recording rainfall or reporting that our smooth-haired fox-terrier was infatuated by our cat.

My world at that time was not extensive. There was memory, as far back as it would go, and the modest reality of Skibbereen, which afterwards became memory also. A mile and a half it was, the journey to school, past Driscoll's sweetshop and Murphy's Medical Hall, and Power's drapery, where you could buy oilcloth as well as dresses. Pots of geraniums nestled among chops and ribs in butchers' windows. A sunburnt poster advertised the arrival of Duffy's Circus a year ago. Horses trudged slowly, carts laden with a single churn for the creamery. On fair-days farmers stood stoically by their animals, hoping for the best.

'You made the journey home again at three, the buying and selling over, the publican's takings safely banked, the last of the dung sliding into the gutters. If you had money you spent it on liquorice pipes or stuff for making lemonade that was delicious if you ate it as it was. The daughters of Power's drapery sometimes had money. But they were always far ahead, on bicycles because they were well-to-do. Or their mother drove them in the Hillman because of the dung.'

At home there was a bookcase on the landing: Jeffery Farnol and Warwick Deeping were tightly packed with Horace Annesley Vachell and Dorothea Conyers to allow pride of place for the entire output of Charles Dickens, which my father had obtained with Sweet Afton cigarette coupons. My sister had a bookcase specially made for her school stories by the postman, who was good at carpentry. Between deliveries one morning he measured The Terrible Twins and The Girls of the Chalet School, Jo's Big Surprise, and all the others. A week later he had the bookcase with him, balanced on the saddle of his bike.

Expanding my world, I began with the school stories: with hockey practices and midnight feasts, beloved head girls and dubious Mademoiselles, the odd Bolshevik spy. Arctic exploration could not have been stranger, and I read until I had read everything, then turned to Dr Fu Manchu. After that it was the rugged decency of Bulldog Drummond, and a hundred or so gentlemanly private detectives. All over England, it seemed to me, bodies were being discovered by housemaids in libraries. Village poison pens were tirelessly at work. There was murder in Mayfair, on trains, in airships, in Palm Court lounges, between the acts. Golfers stumbled over corpses on fairways. Chief Constables awoke to them in their gardens. We had nothing like it in West Cork.

The figures that emerged from the dull grey mass of type on off-white paper were shadows at first and often remained so. But often, too, they brightened into life that was as vivid as reality. They did so more and more, and with a natural ease, when eventually - in the library of the last boarding-schools - I arrived at the short stories of Somerset Maugham, the novels of Aldous Huxley and Waugh and Greene, of Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky and Hemingway and Steinbeck.

Somewhere in that communication, in the exhileration of one imagination touching another, I sensed a marvel. I did not then know that this particular variation of creating something out of nothing - mood and image invented and transferred, lines of dialogue becoming people - was simply the art and craft of storytelling. Nor did I know that I was already the victim of storytelling's temptation.

I've always thought it's best not to know how the thing is done. Marvel it may be, but it's a mystery too; and analysing can be destructive. Interviewers ask questions that seem reasonable enough and yet the answers are elusive. Have I known a man like Mr Hilditch in a recent novel of mine? Or a boy like Timothy Gedge in an earlier one? Or a Mrs Eckdorf or a Mrs de Tanka? Why are there so many fallen women in my stories? Was my childhood unhappy? Do I mind being old? (Although this is usually more politely put.)

It's a bit of a muddle, I tend to say - the writer and the person untidily overlapping, yet sometimes hardly knowing one another. It's true that, to a degree, all fiction is autobiographical: the litmus paper endlessly dipped into personal experience, since the euphoria of happiness, the ache of grief or pain must of course be the storyteller's own. Memory hovers over the past like a figure with a metal-detector on a used-up beach. Yet far more of fiction's raw material comes out of nowhere.

Do I write with a purpose? is a question that lurks among the others. Blatantly evasive, I say I write instinctively and suggest that instincts are difficult to pin down. I mention curiosity: perhaps in writing, a sense of curiosity is satisfied. But really I'm not sure.

Although storytelling's temptation came early, I did not seriously succumb to it until I was in my mid-thirties and had come to know well the England I had once imagined. By now I'd seen the lazy undulations of the Cotswolds, patches of sheep guarded by trimstone walls, old women at dusk strolling in their villages, itinerants at dawn moving through the fields in search of a day's work. I had seen Hardy's West Country places, and the grey, flat Midlands, the sea at Sidmouth. I had known the beer-blurred underworld of Soho, where drugs had been so vilely peddled on the page and now were peddled for the fun of it. I had frequented the last of the Corner Houses and watched the rise of the high-rise flats. The first short stories I ever wrote were set in London. For what has happened since you have kindly given me this prize.

Thank you again.