When Seattle computer programmer Michael Collins told his bosses at Microsoft that he needed some time off from work this past summer, Bill Gates' uber-geeks assumed that Collins, who ran cross-country for the Irish national team and habitually wins extreme sporting events, wanted to train for yet another bout of self-induced oxygen depletion. But unbeknownst to his friends and co-workers in Seattle, Collins is also a best-selling author in Britain, France, Italy, and his native Ireland — where he returned in June to receive the prestigious Book of the Year Award for his latest novel, The Keepers of Truth, an edgily written murder mystery/love story set in post-Industrial America. The award was presented by Irish President Mary McAleese at the 30th annual Writers Week in Listowel.

I, too, attended the Listowel festival. The literati there were enamored with Collins, predicting big things to come. The Keepers of Truth, they said, would surely be considered for this year's Booker Prize in England. As prophesied, the novel did indeed make the shortlist. Now Collins is among six authors who must wait until November 7, 2000 to learn whether they have won the career-enhancing £21,000 prize.

A previous Collins novel, Emerald Underground (a picaresque tragi-comedy about an illegal Irish immigrant in America), was optioned last year for film. Collins' other works have earned him comparison to "Ireland's most distinguished writers" by the London Weekend Telegraph and have consistently garnered high praise throughout Europe. Yet, other than a brief fling with Random House in 1993, Collins has been snubbed by American publishing houses. This struck me as odd, and I decided to track down the underground author at the festival and ask him about his career.

Susan Keating: How did you get started in writing?

Michael Collins: I would first have to credit my mother with sparking an interest in literature. She always had books around the house: Camus, Thomas Mann and others. So there was a canon of literature. And she told stories. As for myself, though, I had no aspirations to be a writer. I was always interested in computers. But all the years that I ran cross-country, where I was running for miles at a stretch, I often told myself stories to amuse myself, to help pass the time. Then, in my last year of college [on a running scholarship to Notre Dame], I was behind in my credits. I took what I heard was an easy writing course. From the first day I was very interested in the course and very diligent about doing the assignments unlike in my other classes (except computers). For the writing assignments, I wrote those stories that I had told myself when I was running.

At the time, I really didn't consider writing as a career. It wasn't presented as an option, but I thought of it as something I would pursue as a passion. A few months after graduation, I went to work as a computer mainframe analyst for Merril Lynch. I decided I would rather eat cold beans from a can and be able to write than earn a lot of money and be tied to the job. I left Merril Lynch. Later on, I traveled around Europe for about a year and a half, and started writing on trains. Finally I got ten or so stories together, and I had a book.

SK: How quickly did you find a publisher?

MC: I couldn't even get an agent. At the time, Pagemaker had just come out, so I produced my own book, a collection of short stories called The Meat Eaters. I used scanners and produced a nice glossy cover. Then I bought an off-the shelf company in the Isle of Man. I got the idea from an ad in the back of an airline magazine. They were selling companies. I bought one called Matavia. It had an address on Bond Street in London and had an answering service with a British-voiced girl answering the phone and taking messages. I got my sister to go around to newspapers in England asking them to review the book. Some of the people called back and asked about it. Then they wanted a Matavia catalogue! So I sat down one night with my wife and made up some cheesy titles and some ISBN numbers, and I typed out these ridiculous summaries. So now Matavia had a catalogue.

SK: What was the response?

MC: Some journalists did review the book. The English publisher Jonathan Cape called and asked for a second book. They thought this was legitimate, that I was with a small publishing company. I wanted them to publish this book I had already produced, so I had to go through this whole wrangling where I pretended to be unhappy with Matavia. I came up with a phony back-and-forth way to disassociate myself from my own company. I wrote a fake contract, and phonied up an argument with Matavia. Jonathan Cape published The Meat Eaters in 1992 — it came out as The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters, with Random House in America, in 1993. I published another novel (The Life and Times of a Teaboy) and a collection of short stories (The Feminists Go Swimming), both in London. But nothing again in America since 1993.