ARIFA AKBAR,Roddy Doyle's new book 'Dead Man Talking', costs just £1. Aimed at people with poor literacy, it is inspired by a death in his own family, the Booker winner tells Arifa Akbar, THE INDEPENDENT,09 FEBRUARY 2015

Roddy Doyle on his new novel, Roy Keane, and writing about ordinary people's lives

A

Roddy Doyle has spent the past five hours talking to inmates at Brixton prison. Not about the recent – triumphant – overturning of the government ban on the number of books prisoners can receive, though Doyle seems happy enough about that – "that just made no sense at all" – but a ghost story he's written, partly for them, which sees the same tormented segment of life repeating over and over for his narrator.

It's a purgatory not too far removed from the limbo of prison life, he thinks, now back at his publisher's upmarket office with a faint air of fatigue creeping out from beneath his smile as he sees me, and the corporate coffee trolley, coming.

"There was a young man [at Brixton] wondering if the narrator will ever escape from this loop he's in, and I was saying 'No, probably not.' I looked at his face and said, 'It's probably quite similar to being in here' and he just nodded. He saw an affinity between the little hell this man is in, and the hell that they are in."

The prison visit was strangely satisfying, he reflects. At Brixton, they asked him fascinating questions, more refreshing than the same old chestnuts journalists put to him: "I always find questions from the public more interesting, less predictable – I don't wish to be mean – and these guys are members of the public, even though right now they are withdrawn from it."