Smash hit

It was at King’s College that the studious former jailbird lifted his self-imposed ban on reading fiction. “It was like falling in love again,” said Bennett. “It was a very intense experience.”

In 1991, he sent The Second Prison, a psychological novel about a man released from jail in Northern Ireland who cannot get the experience out of his head, to a literary agent. It was critically acclaimed on publication, and Bennett soon came to the attention of The Guardian, which enlisted him as a contributor on Northern Ireland. At the paper, he met Georgina Henry, now its deputy editor. The couple live in east London and have a four-year-old son.

Bennett’s first article for The Guardian argued that the only way forward in the north was for talks, with Adams at the top table. It was an ambitious thesis in the early 1990s, and sparked outrage from unionists, who dismissed him as an IRA apologist.

“He has always been seen as someone who would bat for Sinn Fein,” said a senior republican. “He is clearly very learned and skilful, a person of considerable intellectual ability, but he has had a few gaffes too with what he has said about the peace process. At times, even republicans would privately admit that he was overcritical of the unionists.”

A spat with David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist party, began in earnest in the summer of 1994, when Robert Cooper, the head of drama at BBC Northern Ireland, commissioned Bennett to write a television series about the 1916 rising and the war of independence.

Trimble led the revolt against The Rebel Heart, a four-hour £6m production, protesting in a letter to the BBC that Bennett was a “most unsuitable person” to write such a screenplay. Trimble criticised the publicly funded corporation for inviting a republican to write the drama.

Bennett also courted controversy when he declared in an interview with the Spectator magazine that he would not hand over the Omagh bombers to the RUC. Dismissing the province’s police as a “completely discredited force”, he was forced to issue an apology to the families of the victims. This too was attacked for being half-hearted.

When he was first approached about writing a docu-drama about the September 11 attacks, he turned the offer down, saying that it had “great potential to offend”. Months later, he changed his mind. “I wanted to know who these men were and why they did what they did,” he said. As part of his research, Bennett travelled to Hamburg to meet former acquaintances of some of the hijackers. He studied the Koran and Islamic politics and stayed in the streets where the hijackers lived.

The resulting drama, The Hamburg Cell, was attacked by parents of British victims as “cruel and insensitive” when it was shown last year, but welcomed by American families who said it shed light on the hijackers’ motives.

Despite his popularity in literary circles and his newspaper connections, Bennett says he enjoys the quiet life. “I avoid the scene,” he has said. “I don’t hang out. I’ve got the same friends I had at the start. I go back to Derry and Belfast and work with up-and-coming writers in the nationalist community and you can’t go back to those places without being reminded of who you are and why you started.”

He is a self-confessed workaholic. Rising “at the crack of dawn” each day, he often struggles to type 200 words in one sitting. It took him five years to write Havoc In Its Third Year, his fourth novel which was nominated for the Man Booker and won the title of Irish novel of the year. “If it’s not a book, it’s a film, he just doesn’t know where to stop,” said a family friend.

Times Recommends

• Google to digitise Iraqi artefacts
• Renault angers parents by naming new car Zoé
• Analysis: most lawless part of Philippines