Winning stops the working

For a novel about the murder of a poodle in suburban Swindon, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has generated an awful lot of controversy. First came the literary fuss (why on earth wasn't he included on the Booker Prize shortlist?) and then the medical debate (how authentic is his portrait of an autistic 15-year-old boy, and what does he know about autism anyway?).

Last week Haddon hit the headlines yet again by scooping the Whitbread Best Novel of the Year award to immediate predictions that The Curious Incident could be "another Life of Pi" - Yann Martel's 2002 Booker Prize-winning slow-burner that has now sold 500,000 copies.

In the flesh, at home in Oxford, 41-year-old Haddon does not look or sound like a very controversial sort of person. "I'd like to get on with my new book, but I can't seem to find the time in between telephone calls from newspapers," he says drily.

Cradling his perfectly behaved nine-week-old son, Zac, he talks about the subjectivity of prize-giving and how the Booker disappointment was the least important "event" in his life at the time. His wife, Sos, an Oxford academic, had just suffered a very nasty push-bike accident and, at 27 weeks pregnant, had broken her pelvis in two places.

"On the day that the Booker shortlist was announced, I was pushing Sos around the John Radcliffe Hospital in a wheelchair to four different departments. Our three-year-old was on her lap, off nursery because he'd been up all night vomiting, and, you know, the Booker just paled into insignificance. I came home to lots of messages on the answerphone commiserating because I wasn't on the shortlist, but it was all happening a long way off."

Later, chairman of the judges John Carey let it be known that he had lobbied hard for The Curious Incident and was baffled, verging on infuriated, by its non-inclusion. "When the clouds cleared and Sos was better, that was very cheering," says Haddon. "And in terms of publicity, it must have been one of the most helpful failures-to-make-it-onto-a-shortlist of all time."

If the book's profile benefited from Carey's outburst, it was already selling steadily by word-of-mouth. The Curious Incident is Haddon's first novel for adults (although, since no one at publisher Random House quite knew where to pitch it, the same text was also published in a children's version) and is told through the eyes, and in the words, of 15-year-old Christopher Boone, a brilliant mathematician who has a form of autism called Asperger's syndrome.

As the "normal" emotional world inhabited by his parents begins to unravel, Christopher turns detective and investigates the death of his next-door neighbour's dog, writing a peculiarly dissonant narrative of events that turns an everyday tale of adultery into something uniquely poignant. Even more curiously, Haddon says he was thinking not of Catcher in the Rye or any similar rite-of-passage teenage novel as he wrote it - but of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

"What Austen does so well is take the lives of people who are on the surface dreadfully constrained, narrow and superficial, and show that in fact they are infinite and wonderful, and have us empathise with them totally," he says. "Forget Colin Firth in a wet shirt and lots of pretty buxom actresses. If Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice now she'd probably set it in Welwyn Garden City, in a family of accountants. If I was trying to do anything in my book, I was trying to show how Christopher's life - which on the face of it is desperately narrow and constricted - is actually boundless and amazing."

Haddon deliberately did not research Asperger's syndrome - though he did have some experience of mental disability. Straight out of Oxford University and "constitutionally incapable of holding down a proper job", he worked as a volunteer with disabled people and ever since has had "an interested layperson's knowledge of autism".

"Asperger's is a huge-spectrum condition," he says, "and people who have it are just as varied and eccentric as any other group. If you're white and you're going to write a black character, you don't go to the library and read an encyclopedia of black people. That would be an outrageous thing to do. You think, 'I'm going to write a human being,' which is what I did with Christopher."

His favourite response to the novelcame from an 11-year-old girl who reviewed it for a children's book club. "Her brother has Asperger's, and she wrote me a fan letter saying, 'I know about this subject and your book isn't at all silly,' which I found very touching." But not all reviewers have been as kind, and debate rages on the internet among sufferers about how likely Christopher is as a character. "I thought I'd get more of that, to be honest," says Haddon. "I'm aware that this is a sensitive area and people might feel I was intruding."