Geraldine McCaughrean’s first commission as a professional writer was the famously difficult task of retelling The Arabian Nights for children. The resulting One Thousand and One Arabian Nights (Oxford, 1982) remains probably the best ever attempt. Its lush, exuberant language revels in the imaginative luxuriance of the stories.

Since then, McCaughrean has created something of a niche as a reteller of problematic texts, including The Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1984) and now Stories from Shakespeare (Orion, 1994). In addition, she has found time to publish three novels for adults, and three for children; A Little Lower than the Angels (Oxford, 1987) and A Pack of Lies (Oxford, 1988) both won awards and acclaim and her latest, Gold Dust (Oxford, 1993), was shortlisted for the Smarties Book Prize, and last week received the Beefeater’s Children’s Book of the Year Award.

Yet when I met Geraldine McCaughrean at her home in the Berkshire downs, she spoke of her work with real modesty: emphasising, for instance, her debt to the editors at her various publishing houses. It is the ingrained modesty of one who “was very unsuccessful at school” in the shadow of “brilliant” siblings. She left school with two A levels, and went to work as a secretary in the schools department of Thames Television. There her boss “sent me off to college”, at Christ Church, Canterbury.

She realized almost immediately that she was not cut out to be a teacher, but “Fortunately Christ Church had this wonderful English department, really sensationally good. Suddenly people started asking my opinion on things, getting me to write essays. School largely consisted of cramming for exams; no one had ever asked me what I thought of a play. I couldn’t believe it. I was mad keen on the theatre. So, suddenly, I came into my own”.

Her feeling for the theatre permeates her Shakespeare retellings, which are dedicated to the Royal Shakespeare Company, though “I think it’s really ironic that I was in the B group for English at school, considered unlikely to pass A level, and I end up adapting Shakespeare”.

She wants her retellings “to catch the passion of the play: the thing that gives me pleasure when I go to see them, which is moments of extreme stress, crisis, tenderness. That’s why the tragedies were infinitely easier to write than the comedies”. She also wanted “to take the story and try to make it exciting for children. I think children have a strong sense of tragedy”.

The shadow of Leon Garfield looms large, of course, over any modern retellings of Shakespeare. “I don’t remember what I read of his when I was young, but I do remember wanting to be Leon Garfield when I grew up”, she said. It is an absorbed influence, seen, for instance, in the lavish reliance on imagery that has been a feature of her work from the beginning. “I’ve always used similie and metaphor a lot. I think it’s because likening things to other things gives a kind of spurious unity to the world. Everything is akin to everything else; it affiliates. It adds a network of connections, that don’t actually exist but give a sense of structure”.

There is something of Garfield, too, in the moments of spiritual crisis that sustain her narratives like the carved bosses in a cathedral roof. These have a sense of moral ambiguity, and of suddenly revealed humanity that can be very moving. In A Little Lower than the Angels, for example, the cynical playmaster Garvey cavorts naked in church in celebration of his escape from the plague: “At the foot of the altar he stopped, his smooth, white plumpness daubed with bright colours by the sun through the stained glass. He stared down at his body, and large tears splashed on to the brilliant tattoos of light. He was filled with ecstasy at the miracle of his fat, sagging body.” It is a moral rebirth.

Although A Little Lower than the Angels has a very convincing mediaeval setting, it was the result of imagination and intuition rather than painstaking research. “I’m not in the business of educating children, I’m in the business of entertaining them”. A new novel started last year has been abandoned, at least for the time being, because “it died, under the sheer weight of research”.

With Gold Dust, a ferocious farce with a tragic edge about a feverish gold rush in a Brazilian town, the writing became “fun” when she abandoned the research, thinking “Why am I doing this? I’m writing fiction, I can make it up! I don’t have to find this out”. The intense atmosphere of the book was conjured from the air: “Wantage library was as close as I got to Brazil”. So McCaughrean’s Brazil joins Masefield’s Santa Barbara and Buchan’s Olifa in English literature’s oddly vivid shadow map of South America.

The exuberance of Gold Dust’s narrative momentum is anchored by the specificity of its images. Just as the story is about to leap away from reality it is pinned down with some precisely-observed detail. Geraldine McCaughrean compares this to a camera zooming in from middle distance on to a pair of hands, and observes, “My style is very affected by television. My brother and sister grew up virtually without television, because we didn’t get a set until I was about 10, and they’re older than I am. I can tell that our imaginations don’t operate in quite the same way. My mind operates like a television camera. I think in terms of close-ups and pans and fades and cuts. Everything is visualized as if it’s on a screen”.

The filmic pace and construction of McCaughrean’s tales, their inner momentum, is indeed striking. But the words themselves have equal weight with the visual strength. This camera is creating as well as recording.

All Geraldine McCaughrean’s books - though most obviously her intricate weaving of fabulations in A Pack of Lies - echo the Chinese box stories-within-stories intricacy of The Arabian Nights. And as with the Nights, it is storytelling itself that is in the end both the point and the justification of the story. As the priest Father Ignatius says at the end of Gold Dust, “it was Fiction that saved the town”.