Don't expect failure

Before I meet him, author Diran Adebayo warns me that I may have to look in the "black writing" corner of a large London bookstore to find his novels. "I'm not always in the regular A-Z section," he says. "Sometimes they confine me to the black bit. I have no idea who makes these decisions ... it's like black writers have got to win the Booker or a Nobel Prize before they make the A-Z."

In fact, pleasingly, I find him on the mainstream "alphabetical by author" shelves, just above Jane Austen. There are two works: the semi-autobiographical Some Kind of Black (winner of a Betty Trask and a Writers' Guild Award), which traces a Nigerian student's quest for identity from Oxford to Seven Sisters; and My Once Upon a Time, a noir-ish, multi-layered thriller set in deep south London. In terms of language, Adebayo does for black urban Britain what Irvine Welsh did for working-class Edinburgh: both novels resonate with the slang and street idioms of the multicultural inner city. Plot-wise, he sets his fiction in an almost exclusively black world.

"I want to reach a stage where black characters can talk in a language as universal as white characters," he says over tea at home in suburban Tottenham, a few blocks from the street in which he grew up. "You know, the film Titanic plays from Lagos to Delhi to London and no one has a problem taking lessons of love from it. But what would happen if you did the same thing with an all-black cast? It would be a 'black film', just as my books are still categorised sometimes as 'black books'. People have a much harder time drawing an objective message from that."

Variously described as "the voice of the black experience" and "the leading writer of the Now generation", 35-year-old Adebayo has become one of the foremost advocates and promoters of black writing in Britain, and has just co-edited the British Council's latest New Writing anthology. It's something of a family concern, in fact: his elder brother Dotun, a journalist and broadcaster, runs a black pulp-fiction publishing company called X Press, for which another brother writes children's books.

Despite the runaway success of writers such as Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, says Adebayo, there is still some way to go before the "literary industry really respects non-white authors". He complains that the BBC's Big Read, reaching its climax this Saturday, has not featured a single black writer (the top 100 includes just three non-white writers - Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie). What of Ben Okri or Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe or James Baldwin, Maya Angelou or Alice Walker?

But the thing that really disappoints Adebayo about The Big Read is that the BBC has not had a single black person presenting an argument for a book. "We're always told that black kids should be reading more, so it might have made sense to show a black person getting enthusiastic about a book. There is this problem that black people in general aren't really associated with books, or with reading for that matter."

The British literary establishment, he says, is just as bad. "Did you see this year's Booker Prize panel?

There was AC Grayling in his little cravat and the two professors, John Carey and D J Taylor, then Francine Stock with her Cheltenham accent and that other horsey woman whose name I forget... You've got to realise the impact that has, the kind of thing that panel says about literary culture in Britain."

Books were an enormously important part of Adebayo's own childhood. His extremely strict Nigerian father, a journalist who subsequently studied for a chemistry doctorate in London, allowed his sons out of the house after school only to visit the local library in Wood Green or to do the shopping. Adebayo worked his way through Ian Fleming, PG Wodehouse, Wisden and Enid Blyton, absorbing a British literary culture full of stiff upper lips and lashings of ginger ale.

During the school holidays his father set the boys hours of difficult homework - "ancient Greek, complex maths, calculus when I was eight years old" - and as a result they were quickly ahead of themselves at school. Adebayo won a scholarship to Malvern College in Worcestershire and from there, satisfying his father's wish that all the boys enter secure, high-status professions, a place to read law at Oxford.