Winning a literary award, last week he won his second Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for fiction, may be a regular event for novelist and playwright Christos Tsiolkas but awards offer recognition for what is essentially a lonely craft.

“Awards give sustenance to writers who quietly work away and do not see the glory,” Mr Tsiolkas told Neos Kosmos. He won in the fiction category for his latest novel Damascus.

“I worked for about six years on Damascus and it feels good to receive acknowledgement. It was wonderful to win the award and the money ($25,000) in this vocation. The writing of a novel requires obsession and commitment.”

Damascus is a novel that looks at the life of the early years of Christianity through the conversion and life of St Paul.

READ MORE: Christos Tsiolkas talks about ‘Damascus’: The dawn of a new creed

“Paul was a remarkable figure and he created the theology of Christianity.

“I have been pleasantly surprised how people have responded to the book. Many have been Christians who have responded positively. I have enjoyed the discussions that have come from it,” he said.

The Bible, he says, has laid the groundwork of we are now. Our language and philosophy have been shaped by it.

“Our notions of justice, the way think, our reactions to the stranger and to the poor go back to Old Testament Jewish traditions and Greek thinking in the New Testament.

St Paul has been a key figure in Protestant Christianity, but Mr Tsiolkas said his Greek Orthodox background had helped him to approach St Paul from a different angle.

He had to do a lot of research and delve deep into history as part of the writing process for Damascus.

“We need to understand where we are now. There is a lot of information everywhere but research is not.”

“Writing Damascus was one of my best experiences as a writer. I genuinely felt like a student again. It wsa both exhilarating and exhausting. Truth and Doubt are a constant theme.

“The book is closest to Dead Europe (his fourth novel) – you cannot write about Truth without Doubt. Dead Europe was about the shock at the collapse of communism and the fall of another idea.”

“There is always tension between art, politics and ideas. It is necessary. The tension must be played out you cannot reconcile these as it mostly leads to bad art,” he said.