One might not immediately think from his surname – which is of Greek extraction – but Pulitzer-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides has Irish roots.

“Yeah, I actually found out a bit more about this a while ago,” says the softly spoken author, speaking down the line from New Jersey, where he teaches at Princeton. “Apparently my lineage goes back to Cork in the 1650s; they may have been Anglo-Irish Protestants. Then obviously they moved over to the US. I also have some English and of course Greek in my background.”

Perhaps fittingly given his Irish roots, one of Eugenides’ major formative influences was James Joyce’s masterpiece A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, which he read as a teenager in Detroit.