Paul Beatty was born in Los Angeles in 1962. He studied psychology at Boston University and received an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College. He started his writing career as a poet and has edited Hokum, a study in African American humour. In 2016, he became the first American to win the Booker prize with his fourth novel, The Sellout, a coruscating bestseller about race relations in the US. He lives in New York and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

When you started The Sellout, to what extent did you know where you were going with it?
I started with the idea of rendering segregation in a contemporary context. I was asking myself: how do you segregate something without having any power? I was intrigued to try to figure it out. I have a pretty good sense of direction, although I don’t know how I’m going to get there. But the real seed for the book was the character of Hominy [former child actor and latter-day, self-appointed slave]. I tend to like underappreciated characters: you think you see one thing, you might be seeing something else.

I was affected by what you said when you received the Booker prize – you were visibly moved yourself – about writing having given you a life…
I am fortunate in having found something I enjoy, even though I hate doing it too. Writing is a struggle, full of weird contradictions.

As a satirist, do you think there is anything that ought to be satire-proof?
No… but I don’t think of myself as a satirist. I don’t know what the word would be. It is somebody else’s job to find it.

If it is my job, I cannot do it in a word…
That doesn’t bother me. Is it that I don’t want to be placed? I don’t know… maybe. Or maybe a place exists but I have not yet found it.

What kind of a critical response did The Selloutget in the US?
It was good – the reviews I especially liked are ones where people gave up the review format to say what they have to say. One thing that was nice was that one guy [Adam Langer in Forward] wrote about me as a Jewish writer. I’m trying to look beyond expectations of what a black book is supposed to be. I am trying to be new – it is a “novel”, right? The hardest thing doing interviews is that you run into a wall of expectations.

I have watched you in interviews, flinching at questions…
I flinch at everything.

And I’ve just read about the interview at the Sydney writers’ festival, which made headlines as a fiasco for interviewer Michael Cathcart. What happened?
I don’t know, it was fine; my wife thought it was great. What matters to me is the sincerity of the interviewer. You need something mutual – we never had that. I could be wrong, but we started off… off. He had his own agenda… which was fine. But it caught up with him. It wasn’t anything I said. His point of view wasn’t wrong but just so narrow. He wanted to hear himself more than he wanted to hear me, and the crowd picked up on it. Insulting as the question was from him [Cathcart asked Beatty whether people have to learn what it means to be black, and Beatty responded by asking whether he had learned to be white], with another person, we might have had another conversation. He was like: here’s a dog. I’ve found a talking dog. Let me ask all the questions I would ask a talking dog.

You teach creative writing at Columbia and have said you tell students they need to aim to be “unique”. Isn’t that a recipe for dangerous artificiality?
The books that stick are the books that are unique. I don’t see how that is dangerous. Students have to distil from inspiration, and that takes time; it is tough.

Is there a lot of heartbreak?
Yes, but heartbreak is part of doing anything you want to do. I’m hard on students. They made me teach a satire class: I gave students books that violated the rules. People look for secrets and keys – I want to show them there is no one way to do stuff. I tell them to distinguish between being an author and being a writer.

They boast about being authors?
Yeah. I have a friend who is a philosopher. I asked him what it was about philosophy that appealed. He went, “Oh, you know, it just sounds cool, something to tell people in bars.” He is a good philosopher and loves it – but that was part of the allure.

You started studying psychology – what has that contributed to your writing?
It helped shape how I see the world and helped develop an awareness of the notion that what you think is there isn’t there.

Is there a difficulty – something the poet Claudia Rankine implies in her work – that white people want black people to be spokespeople about black issues?
I don’t want to make this about my white friends or about white people in general – people respond to things in different ways… not that I am discounting what she is saying.

What did your parents do?
My mum worked for the city health department, a small clinic. I had two sisters. I am the eldest. My father? He is in California somewhere…

At what point did you move to New York?
1987. I am 54. I went there because I got into a school in New York. It was never a place I was fond of, but New York was easier to navigate then – you could get space, live by yourself. Things are harder now because the city is so expensive. But it was such a good city for music and film – I learned a ton.

I love your line: “He sits in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t as comfortable as it looks.” What do you think of Trump in the hot seat?
Trump pulling out of the Paris accord – that got to me. That was the first time I’ve felt so bad. Trump has done a bunch of vile things but this one really hit me. I was like: man… this guy…

You are wary of other people’s questions. What questions do you ask yourself?
I don’t ask myself big questions. I’ve a friend who was struggling, saying: “I don’t know why I am here… what is the purpose?” I said: “There is no purpose.” If there were a purpose, then I would be frozen.

Do you worry about mortality?
I’ve always been pretty old.

The phrase you’ve used most in our conversation is “I don’t know”…
If I had a mantra, “I don’t know” would be it. Except it is not a question. Could we put a question mark at the end?

 

• The Sellout is out in paperback (Oneworld £8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Oneworld has also published Beatty’s backlist: The White Boy Shuffle, Tuff and Slumberland