BRITISH author Ken Follett, 58, seems to have it all. Firstly, his books actually make money. He made his name at the age of 27 with the page-turning espionage thriller Eye Of The Needle (1978), which has sold more than 10 million copies and which earned the 1979 Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America.
He followed up this success with several best-selling books in the same vein before turning to a totally different genre and winning critical acclaim for it.

The Pillars Of The Earth (1989), set in mediaeval England and centring on the building of a Gothic cathedral in a fictional market town, made Oprah's Book Club last year and sells more than 100,000 copies a year. Though thrillers are Follett's bread and butter, he returned to historical fiction last October with a sequel to The Pillars Of The Earth, World Without End.

The book is set in the same town 200 years later, and incorporates historical events such as the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death.

In a phone interview with LifeStyle from his home in London, he speaks passionately about his interest in Christian architecture, which in turn stems from his own puritanical upbringing.

His parents belonged to a Puritan religious group called the Plymouth Brethren, and the family went to church in a small, bare room devoid of ornamentation.

'I grew up pretty much ignorant of beautiful church architecture, and thus when I started looking around the world for myself, I discovered cathedrals and was hooked. I now spend a lot of time visiting cathedrals as a hobby - I don't go for religious reasons, but for the architecture,' he says.

Reading up on the buildings' histories, he became fascinated with the people who had built these majestic structures. 'They were built by people who were very poor. They lived in wooden huts with earth floors and slept on the ground. They wore very rough, shabby clothes, and yet they built these very expensive and beautiful buildings.'

As a genre writer of no small success, he had long felt the itch to try his hand at something new. 'I was quite young when I became known for spy stories, but I never felt I had to write only one type of book,' he says.

He adds with a wry laugh: 'I wrote Pillars Of The Earth because it seemed to me that there was a great popular novel to be written about the building of a cathedral.'

But success had not always come easy to the author. Born in 1949 in Cardiff, Wales, and raised in London since the age of 10, the eldest of the three children of a tax-inspector was barred from watching movies and television by his devout Christian parents.

While at University College London, he married Mary, a teenage sweetheart, and graduated in 1970 with a bachelor's in philosophy.

He then became a journalist, writing for the South Wales Echo and for the London Evening News, before joining a small London publishing house, Everest Books. He rose to become the deputy managing director.

It was while working at the Evening News that he wrote his first novel, The Big Needle (1974), which he published under the pseudonym Simon Myles, but it failed to make an impact. In fact, he would write about 10 more novels under various noms de plume, all of them flops, before publishing Eye Of The Needle, his breakthrough novel.

In the early 1980s, he and his first wife, who have two grown children, divorced after Follett met Barbara Broer, a Labour Party official who is now a British Member of Parliament representing Stevenage in Hertfordshire.

The couple, who married in 1984, have five grown children, all from previous marriages, and split their time between a rectory in Stevenage, an 18th-century townhouse in London and a holiday home on the Caribbean island of Antigua.

The writer is now working on a trilogy that 'will tell the story of the 20th century through three families', with the first book due for publication in 2010. When not writing, he watches television.

He and his wife are fans of the American television series Star Trek: Voyager.

He says: 'It is a great fantasy about a group of people living on a spaceship which is lost in space. We watch it late at night and it helps send me off to sleep.'

ysteph@sph.com.sg

World Without End ($49.95 with GST) is available at major bookstores.