'The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun," wrote Seamus Heaney in Digging, and he could have written the words for crime novelist Declan Hughes, who has been digging with a pen for a quarter of a century.

Formerly a playwright and theatre director (this year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Rough Magic, which Hughes co-founded with Lynne Parker), currently a novelist, Hughes is enjoying something of an annus mirabilis. His fourth novel, All the Dead Voices, was published in June. His previous novel The Dying Breed has just been nominated for a Shamus award, as well as a 2009 Edgar Award, the American crime-writing equivalent of the Oscar.

"It's terrific to be nominated," says a beaming Hughes. "I particularly treasure the Shamus nominations, because private-eye fiction is such a quintessentially American sub-genre. It's a thrill to write Irish private-eye fiction and make the American grade."

There can no more appropriate writer to open next week's crime fiction strand of the Books '09 Festival, when Hughes presents the crime-writing workshop, Bloodwork.

"Write every day," he says, when I ask for advice, "and, as Lawrence Block says, find a way of putting writing first, if possible, literally, by getting up early and getting it done before the official day begins."

And if Hughes himself were to attend a writing workshop, what writer -- living or dead -- would he like to see at the top table?

"Kenneth Millar, aka Ross Macdonald, was legendarily generous with his time and his advice, and since he is one of my literary heroes, he gets my vote."

Born in Dublin in 1963, Hughes had a childhood that, if not the cliched unhappy childhood of the writer, was certainly one that promoted a sense of being an outsider.

"My father was from Glasgow, he worked in Fairfield Shipyard. I only ever saw him at holidays, maybe three times a year. I grew up in a house full of women, and I was the youngest by seven years, so I was probably spoiled rotten. And then there's the traditional devotion of the Irish mother. So you can see that some of the prime factors for building a writer were there early."

Educated in Dalkey's national school, he went on to Marian in Ballsbridge, and then to Trinity -- something of an eye-opener for the "lower-middle class" boy from glamorous Dalkey.

"Yeah, I discovered about the myth of Dalkey, how it was a place exclusively for kids who were born with silver spoons in their mouths, but that never struck me very forcibly at the time. I had to get a county council grant to go to Trinity, but there was an expectation on my parents' part -- they very much had that attitude of 'education-education-education'. I also wanted to go to Trinity because the Players was there. I was very conscious that that was something I wanted to try and do."

It was at Trinity he met Lynne Parker, and a beautiful friendship was born.

"Myself and Lynne were basically the two people who co-founded Rough Magic, it was our idea. And it was our idea because we met there in Players, and there was so much talent there. It was a salutary thing for me, because I'd entertained some notion of being an actor, but then I met Darragh Kelly, Stanley Townsend, Pauline McLynn, Martin Murphy ... and I thought, 'Oh, well, I can't do what they can'. But equally, I found that I could direct, and from there I built on a sense that it would be great to write, to explore theatre in that way. And we felt that this is too good, this is genuinely too good, to let dissipate with people drifting off. Y'know, what if we try to harness this?"

It was during this time that Hughes met his wife-to-be.

"I met Kathy [Strachan] in 1991," he says, "around the time I wrote Digging for Fire, it was that summer. She was living in Glasgow and Garry Hynes got her over to design some stuff for Druid. I met her at a Steve Earle gig, of all places ... We got married in '95, and have two daughters. Isobel is 10 next month, and Heather is seven-and-a-half. I sometimes think that, there I was as a kid with my literally absent father and my two elder sisters and my mother, a houseful of women, and now I seem to have created one of my own. What do you do?"

Establishing a theatre company in Eighties Ireland was not, he says, the kind of project that would get the thumbs-up on The Apprentice.

"It was hand-to-mouth, we were on shares plus the dole, basically. We were completely broke. We were lucky in that some of our contemporaries who did go into jobs, the few who didn't leave the country, would lob us a few quid to pay the rent. And we were full of piss and vinegar ...

"We were laughing over the weekend, at the anniversary celebrations, saying: 'God, we must have been obnoxious.' But there's something in youthful energy. When you see a young rock band or a young actor full of themselves, half of you thinks they need a good slapping, the other half ... well, it gladdens your heart."

Hughes began directing plays, and gradually began adapting existing texts until he wrote an entire play, the Dashiell Hammett-inspired I Can't Get Started (1990), which was followed by the award-winning Digging for Fire in 1991. At a public reading earlier this year, the most striking aspect of the play is its contemporary relevance.

"Tom Murphy wrote these plays about emigration-immigration," says Hughes. "And it's the old story about the Irish guy who returns home, and he did great, but he doesn't have an arse to his trousers, really, as we eventually find out. But if we'd staged that three or four years ago, it might have seemed as if, y'know, what're they on about? Because at that time, the idea that there were things at stake in Irish society was just unfashionable. People were saying, 'We're done. It's fixed. Everything is solid, and it's just a matter of how high we're going to go.' And nobody thinks like that anymore. Even the people who really want to think like that still can't credibly get away with it."

His obsession with crime narratives saw him write Twenty Grand (1998) while writer-in-association with the Abbey, but he spent a long time wondering if a novel inspired by the trinity of Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald would work in Ireland. In the end he created Ed Loy, an Irishman who has lived in LA for many years before returning home.

"I mean, can you write a hard-boiled detective novel set in contemporary Dublin? I remember having a conversation with John Connolly maybe five years before I started writing about Ed, and his answer, in brief, was 'No'. But I thought, it can be done, but the American background was one of the things that I felt I needed ... Also, Ed was perfect in the sense that he'd been away and then came back, and was looking at this country that had changed so radically. The first one [The Wrong Kind of Blood, which won Hughes the Debut PI Shamus award in the US] was published in 2006 but I started it in 2003, so it was uber-Celtic Tiger time."

Perversely, the boom coincided with a reversal in his personal fortunes.

"The girls being born, that changed the stakes considerably. And it was a strange situation, that shortly after the girls were born, I had the three worst years of my entire career, consecutively. That was very frustrating. Kathy is a freelance costume designer, for TV and film, but freelance work is precarious. So my advice to writers starting out is marry a woman with a job.

"No, Kathy has been hugely supportive all along, and extremely understanding. I think it helped that we knew what we were going through, that there were a couple of years that were a bit ropey, but we'd get through it. But you can sustain that when you don't have kids, because it's kind of romantic, but as soon as you have kids, it just feels stupid, and unnecessary, and very scary."

Once an iconoclast aiming to reshape the parameters of Irish culture, Hughes has mellowed considerably. A "loy", for example, is the spade Christy Mahon used to kill his father in The Playboy of the Western World, and the title of his latest novel, All the Dead Voices, is an echo of Beckett.

"It's come round," he agrees, "it's come round a lot. When I wrote Digging for Fire, I believed everything I said, but as you get older you realise you can't inhabit only one side of the argument. You see more to it. When you're young, you can be perverse without cost. But it just gets increasingly exhausting to insist. And you'd hope that your sense of things becomes fuller, and maybe Ireland has changed and developed and grown. And I have children here, I live here.

"There was a point when I didn't know whether I wanted to stay, when everything was an argument, everything was provisional. And it's not like that anymore. But you know, when you do what I do, you're always at odds with the culture anyway. I mean, pre-Celtic Tiger, I did well enough, and at the peak of the Celtic Tiger I had a few dodgy years. I'm not synchronised with what's going on.

"It's weird. Between books I feel like I don't really know what's happening with the country. And then I start writing and it's like Ed Loy kicks in and he has an angle on it. It's like I just need the information, but he's the one with the opinion. Or two."

Declan Hughes presents Bloodwork, a crime writing workshop, at the Books 09 Festival on Saturday, September 12. For tickets visit www.books2009.ie

- Declan Burke