It’s uncommon to hear a published writer declaring himself to be an ‘amateur’, but Tim Pears is proud to say this. “I don’t like the idea of a professional writer,” says the Oxford-based author of six novels. “My belief is that you have to be an amateur. You have to write from the heart. That’s what the term means, after all.”

His point is that works of fiction should be highly personal artistic endeavours, not bland, faceless products produced for the marketplace. He is not just a writer but also a teacher of creative writing (he is a visiting tutor at Ruskin College, the Oxford higher education institute set up in Victorian times for ‘the excluded and disadvantaged’) and this is what he tells his students: write with conviction, not calculation, write passionately.

This credo casts crisp light on his latest book, Landed. The novel concerns a man, Owen, whose childhood holidays, spent in the rugged beauty of the Anglo-Welsh borders, exert a powerful pull on him, as he comes to terms with the loss of a daughter and part of a limb, following a road accident. It’s not quite as gloomy a read as this suggests, not least because the melancholy of the story is leavened by some glorious, lyrical writing, especially about the landscape of Powys.

It is highly idiosyncratic – simultaneously elegiac and spiky. It has the feel of a book written with great personal involvement – ‘written from the heart’. It is no wonder that it is so rooted in the Welsh landscape as the author spent many of his holidays, just like Owen, with his grandparents in mid-Wales.

“I’ve lived in Oxford for 30 years and I love it,” he said. “I will probably spend the rest of my life here but I still sometimes feel like an immigrant. I sometimes feel that the country is my real home.”

The second half of Landed chronicles a cross-country hike by Owen and his two children, whom he has abducted (post-divorce and post-alcoholism, he is barred from seeing them), by walking across the Welsh landscape. Pears says that “writing is akin to acting… one inhabits characters just as actors inhabits roles” and felt compelled to complete the three-and-half-day hike as part of his research.

He also visited the Nuffield’s prosthetic limb department to learn about losing a hand and spent a long time researching child custody rights, discovering “how the legal process has worked against fathers over the last 20 years”. He also has personal understanding of this: two male relatives have seen estranged partners move with children to another side of the world: “a desperate, irresolvable situation, impossible to make good”.

The author lives, rather more contentedly, with his wife and two young children in North Oxford. He moved to the city in the late 1970s, as a somewhat rudderless 22-year-old, who had left school at 16, and subsequently became a college night porter, but dreamed of becoming a writer or filmmaker. He went on to study directing at film school, but decided that it wasn’t for him. “To be a good film director, you have to be a general of a military operation and I didn’t have the right skills. A writer just needs a pen and paper, then you have the freedom to disappear into your world.”

Rummaging around his CV, you find all sorts of occupations popping up: librarian, building labourer, nurse in a mental hospital, pianist’s bodyguard, painter and decorator, sorter of mail, art gallery manager. Was it that archetypal thing of him making ends meet, even though he secretly yearned to be an artist?

“On the one hand, I was quite single-minded about wanting to become a writer,” he says, “but at the same time, I had a lack of confidence to do anything else, to be a professional. I wasn’t able to be anything else but a writer, I suppose, but also I didn’t want to be anything else.”

He loves walking and football — he coaches a Summertown Stars under-11s squad and has written some sports journalism— but apart from that, his time is devoted to fiction. He is either teaching creative writing —”it’s thrilling to read something terrific by a student”, he enthuses) or else is chiselling away at his own richly inventive prose.

“I always want to go in a new direction,” he said. “There are two types of writers — one sort who have a strong perception of the world that is imprinted on them: they reproduce the same book over and over. Then there are others who are trying to be receptive to the world freshly each time. That’s what I try and do.”

* Landed is published by William Heinemann at £12.99.