The highlight of The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival of 2009 for me, and I am sure for very many others, was the appearance of the novelist Ian McEwan. His 10am session in the Garden Marquee at Christ Church brought us from our beds rather earlier perhaps than usual on a Sunday morning but was valuable for the insights it gave us into his remarkable body of work, much of it completed, of course, during the 18 years he lived in Oxford.

The purpose of his appearance was, primarily, to receive The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. This was presented by the literary editor, Andrew Holgate. He reminded us of some of the previous recipients, including Seamus Heaney, Anthony Burgess, Ted Hughes, Margaret Atwood and, last year, Sir Tom Stoppard. “Britain’s finest living novelist”, as he described McEwan, was fully entitled to be among such distinguished company.

The long interview that followed with Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times’s fiction editor, was as entertaining as it was instructive.

A highlight, reserved until the end, was a reading from the novelist’s work in progress which, surprisingly for those familiar with his oeuvre, appears to have a strong comic element.

His glimpse of what is to come arose after he explained how he set about finding subjects for his work.

He said: “I find it very hard to get ideas for novels. I never imagine them whole. They start usually with a sentence. I doodle a lot. I write paragraphs of novels I feel I am never going to write. It is out of those that I trick myself into writing one.

‘Take the novel I am writing now which has climate change as its background. I wrote, ‘He belonged to that class of man – short, fat, clever – who are unaccountably attractive to certain women, or he believed he did and thinking seemed to make it so.’ I thought, ‘I could spend a couple of years with a man like that . . .’”

Later he fleshed out the character in his brief reading. The fat, short fellow turned out to be a physicist, whose fifth marriage was disintegrating. “For once it was his wife who was having an affair. Flagrantly, punitively, she was seeing a builder.” (There followed a witty description of the vulgarities of the home he had built himself.) “How complicated it was to be a cuckold.” Kemp’s first question concerned McEwan’s beginnings as a writer and what had attracted him to the craft. It began, he explained, through reading, not in a bookish home (both his parents left school at 14) but with novels borrowed from a library on one of the many Army bases where his young life had been spent. “One book I remember was The Gauntlet, about a boy who slips on a medieval glove and is transported to the past. At 14, I read Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net. I had an English master who was passionate about Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and John Masterson. As a schoolboy with flamboyant acne and thick glasses I became passionate about literature through that great engine of English A-level.”

As a writer, he first wrote short stories influenced by those of E.M. Forster before embarking on the violent and frightening tales which, in two published volumes, made his name. His first two novels, The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers had really been novellas. It was only after six years away from fiction, chiefly writing film scripts, that he produced his first full-length novel in The Child in Time.

McEwan told us: “The novel is the most elaborately developed method of knowing what it is like to be someone else.” This seemed to me a statement so neat and true that it deserves to be at once included in any forthcoming book of literary quotations.

He told us, too, that had it not been for his friend Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford academic and Guardian writer, his 2001 success (later filmed) Atonement would have been called ‘An Atonement’. He had told McEwan as publication deadline loomed: “You are making a terrible mistake with that title,” and the novelist concluded that indeed he was.

As this column nears its end, I must conclude by noting that a meeting with Richard Blair, the adopted son of George Orwell, was another festival highlight. This former farmer and agricultural equipment supplier (with Massey Fergusson) had been talking in public for the first time about his distinguished dad, with whom he enjoyed a few brief years on Jura before his untimely death from tuberculosis.

Richard, who lives in Warwickshire, had spent the previous evening at a Tory party selection committee – a most un-Orwell-like activity, I thought but didn’t say.

I was schtum, too, on the subject of Richard Curtis’s new film The Boat That Rocked when I met its star Bill Nighy at Sunday’s end-of-festival lunch. With reviews so bad, – including the one in that day’s Sunday Times – a mention hardly seemed diplomatic.