GRAEME Macrae Burnet has just spent the afternoon in the Mitchell library working on his latest book. The subject of the novel is not one that he’s willing to divulge, since it's still early days on the work. "It could all end up in the bin,” he says, as we talk over coffee in the CCA bar in Glasgow. “I don’t want to talk about it too much. I’m frustrated that I’m not further on it. So what’s the point in having a conversation about it?” Later he’s almost apologetic about this. “You feel kind of rude,” he muses. “I feel a bit rude to you, not discussing it.”

This would be 50-year-old Burnet’s fourth novel, and it is, he says a “stand alone” work. In other words, it doesn’t relate to either His Bloody Project, his tale of a 19th-century triple murder set in the crofts of Wester Ross that got him within reaching distance of the Man Booker prize, or his series of two literary mysteries set in France, The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau, and The Accident On the A35.

It’s hard to believe that less than two years ago Burnet was an author who few had heard of, published by the tiny house, Saraband, his second novel, His Bloody Project, having sold only around 800 copies. And then, the fairytale twist happened. The novel got on the Booker longlist, and then onto the Booker shortlist, and suddenly he was outselling all the other authors who were in the running, had a film deal with Scottish production company Synchronicity, and was the bookies' favourite to win. The prize that year went to the American author Paul Beatty. But Burnet came about as close as you can to experiencing what it is to become an overnight literary sensation.

Was he more happy to discuss his novels before he was famous? “I don’t regard myself as famous,” he answers. “No writers outside JK Rowling, Ian Rankin and Val McDermid are famous. The word famous makes me laugh anyway.” But do people he knows ever refer to him as famous? “My girlfriend does,” he says. “The thing is I come back from Norway and then there’s an article in a Norwegian newspaper about me. Now if that happened to somebody else I would think they were famous. But I don’t think I’m famous.”

Having got that close to winning the Booker, though, I ask, has he been pestered by voices, in his own head, telling him, with each new book, that maybe this time you could win it?

The short answer is no. That’s not the voice he has to beat back. Rather, the one that nags at him is mainly saying, "This is sh**. You’re sh**. This is a terrible idea. Nobody will ever want to read this.’ All these extremely crippling thoughts of self-doubt.”

“The thing,” he says, returning to my question, “about these thoughts you mention, is that is all they do is prevent you writing. And if you listen to them you won’t write anything. Maybe in an idle moment, you might think them, just as you might think maybe I’ll start a band and win the Mercury music prize. But you can’t second guess what any prize committee is going to think.”

Besides, he doesn’t believe it’s possible to be that calculating with novel writing. “Actually you can only write the books that you want to write." He also observes that each book can only ever be the unique product of the person who writes them. “Your accumulated experience of your life filters in there. I grew up in a small town. I went to Prague when I was a 22 year old. I’ve read certain kinds of literature, mostly European literature, and when people say what are your influences, you can point to a couple of things that are very direct but actually it’s a much more amorphous, nebulous process. Why do I love Georges Simenon? Because he writes about characters that I relate to. So if I then write a character that I relate to, it’s partly the influence of Simenon, but it’s also the reason I like Simenon.”

Burnet grew up in Kilmarnock, the son of a home economics teacher and a father who worked for Johnnie Walker. “I didn’t have a literary upbringing, so books were something I discovered for myself. I think they [his parents] are probably as surprised as anyone.” About his parents he doesn’t really want to say anything more than that. “I’m not really wanting to go there with mums and dads. They’re very happy that I’ve had a bit of success.”

He studied at the University of Glasgow then went off and travelled Europe, teaching English as a foreign language, and wound up back in Glasgow 20 years ago, where he now lives in the west end. For a while he worked in television.

His Bloody Project, which presents itself as a series of found documents, revolves around the central character of 17-year-old Roderick Macrae, a crofter who shares a name with the author. Some of the character names are in fact real, though the story is a fiction. Burnet really did have a grandfather, for instance, called Donald “Tramp” Macrae. His mother, Primrose, grew up in Lochcarron, not far from where the book is set. There is even a family home which he can go and hole-up in for the odd week of writing, usually in winter. “And a week up there in the winter," he says, "is quite a long time because there’s not a great deal to do.”

But, says Burnet, he's uncomfortable in such small communities. “It goes back to this feeling of-self consciousness. If you live in a small village, it’s not so much that people know your business, but they see you walking up and down the street and I don’t want to be visible in that way. Which might sound strange given I’m quite a noticeable person.”

He is certainly visible, tall and distinctive, a tiny highly-recognisable quiff perched on the top of his forehead. It would be hard for him to disappear in a village.

Even Kilmarnock, the town in which he grew up, was just a little bit small for him. As a teenager, he recalls, he had wanted to get out of there. “And not because it’s Kilmarnock. I think I would have felt that whatever small town I would have grown up in.”

The desire to get out and go away, took him away to teach in Europe. “I felt it wouldn’t be right just to live in the same place for your whole life.” At 22 years old, he went to Prague, arriving there less than a year after Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. Back then it took him two days by train, from London. “You got stopped at the border by men in long grey trenchcoats with weapons.” The city, he says, was changing then, on a weekly basis.

He’s not been back there, though it is now just a cheap flight away. He isn’t sure he wants to. “Why would I go back when what I want is to go back to the Prague I knew, which doesn’t exist anymore?”

Burnet continues to have an interest in the Cold War period in central Europe. In fact, the culture, the atmosphere of paranoia created in a society where there are secret police and informants, is something he is so drawn to that he is planning on writing a novel set in that environment. “It’s an idea I have that I will get to. Because I’m so fascinated by it ... There’s your exclusive. That’s something I will write.”

However, even his French crime novels, contain some of that climate of paranoia. “In the small town of St Louis in France, where they are set, obviously it’s a free society, but I think my characters live as if they are under a regime. My central character is extremely paranoid. He lives in a state of sort of hyper self-consciousness where he thinks that his every action is being observed and commented on.”

Anyone who has read any of Burnet’s books will be unsurprised to learn he has an aversion to rules and regulations. A key scene in His Bloody Project sees Roderick Macrae and his father visit the house of the factor in charge of the estate on which his family has a croft. What they want is to see the regulations they ought to be following. They want to know them, they say, so that they may avoid breaking them. To their surprise the factor answers that the regulations do not exist – not in any written down form. They only exist because we believe they exist.

It’s extremely Kafkaesque. Burnet acknowledges the influence of the Prague-born author on his work. But, he says, it was only after he had written the scene that he discovered that there’s a Kafka short story, The Problem Of Our Laws, which, he says, “expresses exactly the same idea”.

“I hadn’t actually read the story, but The Trial is an incredibly important book for me. I love the phrase “the powers that be” because it expresses this feeling of authority that isn’t quite manifest".

In his own life Burnet tries, if he can, to avoid butting up against regulations. “I hate having any contact with the state,” he says. “I loathe being in contact with bureaucracy. I like to live as separate from all that as possible.”

How, I ask, does he manage that?

“I don’t have any kids,” he quips. “It’s hard once you’ve got kids. You’ve got to engage with things like schools and doctors.”

It’s a dislike he has had from a young age and which has made him a law abider by nature. “The thing is I’m not a rebellious person by nature. I’m very compliant. I have a great fear of breaking the rules. I never got into trouble at school – and whenever I did get drawn into any rule breaking it just wasn’t enjoyable to me. I haven’t lived a life of raucous criminality because I’m just no good at it. It’s not that I’m more moral than somebody who does that stuff. It’s just I’m too scared to get caught.”

The kind of existential paranoia his books describe is something that he feels in his life. “You feel that there are unspoken rules which are supposed to govern behaviour and if you don’t follow those rules you will somehow be accused.” When he is walking down the road, for instance, he explains: “I’m constantly playing out scenarios where I’m being accused of something I haven’t done. ”

The digital age, of course, has brought its own ways through which we can be watched and examined. Is he bothered about surveillance now? “I’m on Facebook, I’m on Twitter. I’m not naïve about the fact that if I publish information on the internet it’s therefore public. It’s in the public domain. I don’t do anything personal about my personal life. But the mining of data is disturbing.”

Burnet did a postgraduate degree in international security at St Andrews University and has an informed perspective on these matters. He recalls a book that he read many years ago, about how liberal democracies respond to terrorism. "It was probably in the late 1970s and it envisages a situation where there would be cameras on the end of every street and describes that this would be like living in Stalinist Soviet Union because it was such a ridiculous outrageous idea.”

It’s clear from his books that he is a bit of a Francophile. So, I ask, is his French really good?

“It’s absolutely shocking,” he replies, with a shake of the head. This seems quite a surprise, given that the two novels pretend, quite convincingly, as part of their metafiction, to be translations from the French. Don’t you need a bit of working knowledge of the language to get away with that?

Not really, it turns out. Though, actually, if not the language, Burnet does know the France he writes about quite well. He spent about six months there during his 20s, and also returned, for research purposes, to visit in recent times. “I think I’m probably the only person who ever spent time in France and their French got worse,” he recalls. The problem, he outlines, was that when he was working there as a teacher he was so broke he didn’t go out. The people he met were those he was teaching English to. “The extent of my French was," he says, "Un paquet de Gauloises blondes legeres, s’il vous plait.” He knew, in other words, how to order a packet of cigarettes.

Now that his novels are being translated into French, he is feeling the urge to amend that situation. “I’m actually taking some French lessons just now because it’s the great embarrassment of my life. Especially having written two books set there. I am a Francophile but I don’t speak the language.”

But, he observes, in order to convince the reader that the book is a translation from some 1970s French text, you don’t need to be able to speak good French. What you need, at least for the books he has written, is to have read and absorbed a lot of Georges Simenon.

Remarkably, for some years, Burnet did not have an agent. That was the case even at the time he was shortlisted for the Booker. After that, was everyone suddenly courting him? “I did then have a lot of emails from agents, saying can we have coffee. Which was nice.” However, it was only recently that he signed up with one, Isobel Dixon at Blake Friedmann. “Things,” he says, “were getting too complicated."

Currently, it seems that what he is suffering from is one of the happy dilemmas that come with success. Too many invitations to speaking engagements around the world mean that he’s struggling to fit in enough writing time. But it's hard to turn invitations down. Burnet recalls that when he got shortlisted in 2015 for the Booker Prize, and they first started to flood in, he made a decision that he was going to make the most of things and do as much as he could. "I consciously decided I will grab every opportunity at this point because it seemed once in a lifetime. So I was going to do everything and I did everything. But I expected after Booker it would all dry up.”

A year and a half on, and there are no signs of that drying up. Nor are there likely to be any time soon.

Graeme Macrae Burnet is speaking at Aye Write today at 3pm