He is married to the fashion editor of Vogue magazine yet claims to own just three pairs of trousers. He was born in a county famed for hurling, but plays cricket in New York. And last week Joseph O’Neill became the Irishman whose Man Booker Prize-nominated work was being lauded as the “great American novel”.

The 44-year-old writer is used to shocking people but with some bookies tipping Netherland, his story of cricket in post 9/11 New York, as favourite to win this year’s Man Booker Prize, he is surely hoping that this time he does exactly what everyone expects.

Until recently O’Neill was an unknown in his base city of New York. He could walk around Manhattan without being bothered. There were many more recognisable faces lurking in the halls of his Chelsea Hotel apartment block, once home to Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen. O’Neill was almost as well known for being a “Vogue husband” as he was for his three previous books.

Since Netherland, everything has changed. Now he has reporters from the New York Times monitoring the cricket matches he plays with an amateur Staten Island club for links to his writing, yellow cabs play interviews with him on their back seat television sets, and New York magazine crowned him “the King of New York”.

With all that going on in the background it wasn’t a huge surprise when O’Neill was last Tuesday named as one of 13 authors, including his fellow Irish writer Sebastian Barry, long-listed for the £50,000 (€63,463) book prize.

Netherland and The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, are the favourites to scoop the award. While Rushdie is an old hand at the Booker business — he has been nominated twice before and Midnight’s Children, his success in 1981, was last month voted the best Booker prize winner of all — things may yet go O’Neill’s way.

For a start, Irish writers have a good record in the competition in recent years. Before 2005, Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea in 1978) and Roddy Doyle (Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha in 1993) were the only Irish winners since the competition was launched in 1969. In the last four years, however, two Irish writers have prevailed — John Banville in 2005 with The Sea and Anne Enright last year for The Gathering. Maybe that’s why William Hill, the bookmakers, have O’Neill a nose ahead in the betting to take the prize.

That Netherland is now classed as a “great American novel” despite O’Neill being born in Cork is no surprise. He has never been an easy man to put into a box. Born to parents of Irish and Turkish descent, he was moved between continents as a child and between cities and careers as an adult. His varied background could easily be regarded as the strength behind his most successful works.

After his birth in Bon Secours hospital, Cork, in 1964, he spent his childhood in Mozambique, Iran and Turkey. His parents then moved to Holland where his father built oil refineries. As a teenager, O’Neill spent his adolescent years in the Hague. He studied law at Cambridge and was a practising solicitor in London between 1990 and 1998.

His love of prose led him to write two novels during his training and formative years as a lawyer. But neither This Is the Life nor The Breezes, written in 1991 and 1995 respectively, made an impact. It wasn’t until the publication of Blood-Dark Track: A Family History in 2001, the story of the imprisonment of his Irish and Turkish grandfathers in the second world war, that he became a full-time author.

His Irish, paternal grandfather was interned for being a member of the Irish Republican Army and his maternal grand-father, a Turkish hotelier, was imprisoned in Palestine by the British on suspicion of being a spy.

O’Neill spent seven years agonising over Netherland. He had no agent or publisher and the gap between its publication and his previous novel was rapidly growing. At one point he chucked the whole thing in, phoning his wife, Sally Singer, to tell her he was giving up.

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