He says: "My book is about three women of ambivalent sexuality, one of whom is Virginia Woolf, so when I was nominated I thought ha ha ha... But maybe my favourite thing about winning the prize is the implication that the American experience is broad enough and deep enough to include three women of ambivalent sexuality one of whom is Virginia Woolf.
"I haven't changed my view that prizes are mostly stupid and embarrassing, but I do like the fact that this odd little book was deemed in some way to be about the American experience."
Cunningham's own experience as a writer appears typically American. After graduating from Stanford he enrolled in the Iowa Writers Workshop where a lingering uncertainty as to his vocation was quickly clarified by exposure to "sixty people who were willing to commit murder over a paragraph". He sold some short stories but kept abandoning novels after 50 pages. Finally, as his 30th birthday approached, he determined to finish a book, "good, bad or indifferent". Golden States was well reviewed but soon sank from view and he didn't publish another novel for ten years.
During this time Cunningham continued to write as well as teaching creative writing. His resurrection came when he sent a story to the New Yorker just to prove to a new partner how miserable the life of a writer was and how quick rejection letters come back. In fact a very encouraging note arrived, which eventually led his 1990 eternal triangle novel A Home at the End of the World, the ambitious Flesh and Blood in 1995 and now The Hours, which has variously been described as inspired by, a gloss on, and an homage to Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway.
Cunningham himself prefers to appropriate a musical term. "I think it's more like the way a jazz musician might do a riff on an older established piece of music," he says. "It doesn't claim or conceal the older piece of music, but it takes that music and turns it into something else."
Cunningham's something else turns out to be an absorbingly moving triptych beautifully crafted across three time frames - from Woolf's 1920s Richmond to 90s Manhattan. His original intention was for a contemporary New York version of Woolf's novel with a gay man moving through upper class gay society as Clarissa Dalloway moved through twenties society in England. But although he eventually decided against, "treating it like a party trick", he has still echoed Woolf's depiction of a world coming to terms with catastrophe.
"The three sections are set at the end of World War One, the end of World War Two and at a change, although not the end, of the Aids epidemic," he explains. Cunningham was a member of the radical Aids campaigning group ACT UP and, while not wishing to make any "smug parallels" with war, he says he has witnessed "things that are in the same ball park as war. You get a sense of who people are and what they are capable of, for good and ill".
One unwanted byproduct of the book's success is that, after 30 years of being a fan, he is now "just a little bit tired of Virginia Woolf", although he is still deeply affected by the manner of her death. "I thought of the river Ouse in terms of something like the Mississippi," he says, "some thing you could jump into as Anna Karenina jumped under the train. But in fact it's a puddle the length of a river. It completely changed my mind as to the act of despair and volition that her suicide was."
