Jane Urquhart was inspired to be an 'essentially Canadian' writer by the author of Anne of Green Gables. But when the work needs to get done, it's to Co Kerry she goes, she tells Anna Carey.

When novelist and poet Jane Urquhart was growing up in 1950s Canada, she didn't have many literary role models. In a country that was culturally dominated by what she calls "mother England and father America", home-grown authors, particularly female ones, were few and far between. But one fictional young lady played a big part in encouraging Urquhart to write. Most readers on this side of the Atlantic are familiar with Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. But it was another Montgomery creation who inspired just about every famous female Canadian author to pick up a pen, and that was her most autobiographical heroine, the charismatic aspiring writer, Emily, of New Moon.

"The Emily books were fantastic for any of us in Canada who were female and had the remotest interest in being writers," says Urquhart. "Here was this young Canadian girl who was going to become a writer no matter what. This was not just a hobby for her, it was a calling, a vocation. It was like entering a convent or something. And in some sort of crazy way, it gave us permission to write."

Recently, some of Canada's most celebrated writers have been expressing their gratitude. Margaret Atwood wrote the forward to a new edition of Anne of Green Gables, while Urquhart herself got to pay public homage to her childhood heroine.

"Alice Munro and PK Page and I were asked to do the introductions for new editions of all of the Emily books and I just thought, oh, if my 11-year-old self knew about this, she would be so delighted!" says Urquhart. "But, as young Canadian women, we'd all encountered this young woman. There's a bit where Emily is about to go off to New York and an American magazine, and her teacher says that he always hoped she would reflect her own country and do something essentially Canadian. And that was fantastic, and an essential part of my upbringing."

Today's young Canadian would-be writers have no shortage of role models, including Uquhart herself, who has just published her sixth novel. A Map of Glass is a lyrical, unsettling book which begins when a young artist called Jerome discovers the body of a man frozen in ice on the banks of an island in Lake Ontario. Soon afterwards, Jerome is visited by Sylvia, a middle-aged married woman who was the lover of Andrew Woodman, the man in the ice. Sylvia, a strange woman with an unspecified Asperger syndrome-like condition (Urquhart is careful not to attach labels to the character, whom she herself describes as "odd") tells Jerome not only about her own life but about Andrew's family in 19th-century Ontario.

Like Urquhart's previous works, it's a very visual novel, filled with unforgettable images, such as the dead man in the ice or a hotel slowly filling with sand. Enabling her readers to "see" her story imaginatively is something that's important to her.

"I sometimes refer to it as inner theatre," she says. "In a way, it's almost like watching a film and describing what's going on to someone else."

Urquhart has been working with the Canadian National Council for the Blind - which inspired the tactile maps made by Sylvia in the novel - and was impressed by the films for the blind that she borrowed from the council's library.

"There's a running commentary all the way through [describing the setting and the action], and it was incredibly like a novel - a really good novel, too," she says. "I took home Shakespeare in Love, and the commentary was incredibly well done. The sex scenes were great, they struck just the right balance. And I realised that this is what novelists do - they create a world for the reader and it has to be visual. If I can't see it in my head, then the reader can't see it. And when I can't visualise what I'm writing about, then I know it's time to stop working for the day."

Urquhart is particularly good at depicting the rural Canadian landscape.

"One of the interesting things about being a Canadian writer and reader, especially for people my age, was that books always took place somewhere else," she says. "We didn't have literary landscapes, because we didn't have a literature of our own. So with the exception of Montgomery and Prince Edward Island, there was nowhere you could go and have that feeling of familiarity from books. Going to Britain and Ireland for the first time was so exciting, because I was entering a landscape that had previously been purely imaginary to me."

Although she and her family live in Stratford, Ontario (home to one of Canada's most prestigious drama festivals), Urquhart is no stranger to Ireland's landscapes, literary and otherwise. She's owned a house in Co Kerry for nearly 10 years, which she usually visits about four times a year.

"I know my neighbours, I even know their animals, I know the landscape," she says. "It's a home away from home, which is a good thing for my writing. If I was back in Canada, I'd be getting a lot of requests for talks and things like that. And I'm not very good at saying no. But when I'm in Ireland, I can say no because I've got a good excuse! So sometimes I come here to work, but I also come with my daughter and my husband. We spent Christmas here last year."

Urquhart decided to buy an Irish residence when visiting her husband, Tony, who at the time was artist in residence at Cill Rialaig in Co Kerry.

"I was in Dublin on the Impac jury that year - I think it was my consolation prize for not winning the year before," she says.

When she went down to Co Kerry, she saw the house in an auctioneer's window and went to view it "as a lark. I had no intention of buying property here in Ireland, but I walked in and I knew I could write there". She finds the isolation of the house, which is situated up a boreen, conducive to her work.

"If I'm at a point when I really have to do nothing but concentrate on the work in hand, I go there without my family," she says. "It makes a huge difference - I can eat when I want to, for one."

Although A Map of Glass is set in Canada, there's an Irish element to the story. And it's not the first of Urquhart's novels with an Irish connection; her magical 1993 novel, Away, told the story of an Irish family in 19th-century Canada.

"I think [an international setting] is something that happens naturally, but I have to admit that I've been fascinated by all things Irish for a very long time," she says. "I've read extensively in Irish literature, and so I think there was always something there, partly brought on by the fact that my mother's side of the family were Quinns, of Irish descent, and were very ferocious about this fact. So I grew up hearing a lot of stories about Ireland."

She adds that working here also tends to strengthen the Irish element in her writing.

Like many Canadian writers, from Atwood and Carol Shields to Michael Ondaatje and Leonard Cohen, Urquhart began her writing career as a poet. So was there something in the Canadian water in the 1960s that inspired so many young writers to turn to poetry before prose, or was the reason more mundane?

"I think it had a lot to do with the fact that in the beginning we all published with very small houses that had no money," Urquhart says. "And they pretty much let you know that more than 66 pages was too much! And poetry was more manageable - it was relatively easy to publish a poem."

For the last 20 years, Urquhart has concentrated primarily on novel writing, although she's continued to write poetry and publish it in magazines. But her next big literary project will be a poetic one.

"I've gone into my archive, back to 1978, and '79, and '80 and '91, and pulled out all the unsuccessful poems I wrote back then, the ones I never really finished. And I'm going to begin by working on those," she says.

Connecting the past to the present in a lyrical and imaginative way - Jane Urquhart's new project doesn't sound all that different from her novels.

* A Map of Glass, by Jane Urquhart, is published by Bloomsbury, £10.99.