(He won over the 2000-strong audience by breaking out his ukulele and singing in a Roman dialect.) Early next month, the 48-year-old will be in Australia for the Sydney Writers' Festival, speaking about his work with commentator David Marr, before going to Brisbane (the State Library of Queensland), Byron Bay (the Byron Writers Festival) and Melbourne, where he will be chatting with Good Weekend columnist Benjamin Law at the Athenaeum Theatre. There was also the invitation to read extracts from The Story of a Marriage at Rome's ancient Forum backed by a full orchestra. Even the heaving commercial heart of the city, Union Square, was the hub of mass demonstrations during the Civil War in support of the Union and opposing slavery.īut there is something else about Greer's books – something that explains not just his Pulitzer Prize for Less, but Madonna buying the film rights to his 2013 novel The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (the pop star called him personally to say how much she loved his book). San Francisco has long been a refuge – and a place of defiance – for tormented minorities, from the now gentrifying black ghetto of the Mission to the capital of hippiedom in the 1960s, Haight-Ashbury, to the rainbow flags fluttering along the Castro, initially settled by gay servicemen discharged from the US army during World War II.

Greer's characters may stand outside the conventional herd, but they're people you get to know and can't easily forget. Or Arthur Less, the dejected middle-aged novelist and main protagonist of Less (2017), who lives in a small house on the Vulcan Steps, which are carved into a hill between San Francisco's Castro and the Haight. Or the title character of The Confessions of Max Tivoli (2003), who ages backwards over his lifetime between 18, shyly obsessed with the young woman who lives in the flat below him in the rundown neighbourhood of South Park, after his once-wealthy family moved here from well-to-do Nob Hill. Pearlie Cook, the narrator of Greer's third novel, The Story of a Marriage (2008), lives in the flat, cookie-cutter neighbourhood of Outer Sunset in the San Francisco of 1953, tip-toeing around her strikingly handsome husband Holland, who is addled by post-traumatic stress disorder, until her perception of him is tested by the arrival of a mysterious blond man, and a $100,000 offer that curls the reader's toes.

Andrew Sean Greer: “It was important for me for Arthur as a queer character in Less to be given a happy ending, because I’d long wanted to read that book and I couldn’t find it.” Credit: Getty Images

Less pulitzer prize