There's none of the self-referential spot-the author stuff here, just a beautifully wrought tale of the ordinary disasters that befall people who start life on the wrong end of a raw deal.

Tomato Red was even better: a wonderfully funny and tragic tale of blighted white-trash dreams. Annie Proulx gave it a rave of a blurb and his advance was large enough to buy a house back in West Plains. It's a bitter, oddly lyrical novel which brings the region and its people vividly to life. The hero, Doyle Redmond, is a failed novelist who heads back to the Ozarks and soon gets involved with blood feuds between local drug dealers. Woodrell started Give Us a Kiss, and this time he began with what he knew. It was in San Francisco that things began to turn. We lived in Arkansas, then Cleveland, then here, then we went to San Francisco for a couple of years.' All my books had disappeared without a ripple. When they flopped, Woodrell was left in a bad place, both financially and mentally: 'I kind of fell into a pit for a few years there. I pass small towns whose every store seems to sell agricultural hardware, and finally land up in West Plains, where the family has lived for generations. The Ozark region is, for the most part, surprisingly un-mountainous. To interview him, I had to fly to St Louis and drive for four or five hours into the middle of nowhere. Woodrell lives and works in the Ozarks and avoids the publicity circuit. It's set in a dirt-poor, time-forgotten fastness, somewhere amid the Ozarks, and it's as beautiful and harsh as an Appalachian folk song. All this might just be about to change with the publication of Winter's Bone (Sceptre, £12.99). Yet, 20 years and eight books into a writing career, he remains a cult figure - a 'writer's writer'. He has had a book filmed by Ang Lee and been lavishly praised by his peers, from Annie Proulx to Roddy Doyle.

Daniel Woodrell, from the town of West Plains deep in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, has long been one of the best-kept secrets in American literature.

Woe to live on by daniel woodrell