He has taken on drugs, crime and corruption in Baltimore; and brutalised young soldiers in Iraq. Now David Simon, the creator of the hit TV series The Wire, is to create a drama that treats Hurricane Katrina as an allegory for the financial, social and cultural disasters that have shaken the US over the past year.

The series, called Treme, after a New Orleans neighbourhood, was commissioned by HBO earlier this month after a successful pilot, and will air in the US in 2010. Filming will start later this year – after the hurricane season abates. The 10- or 12-part drama will be, Simon told the Guardian, "an allegory for the trauma that the country as a whole went through two years later".

"The fact is that the levees on the canals were substandard, and done on the cheap at an immense profit. Ultimately that becomes a metaphor," he said. "New Orleans was relying on things that were believed to be genuine bulwarks against tragedy and disaster. People felt that there were similar bulwarks protecting our financial institutions and foreign policy. Now, two years on, we are all essentially in the same boat as New Orleans. Katrina was an outlyer of where we are today."

Simon, whose The Wire has been hailed as a masterpiece of novelistic, sophisticated television was speaking to the Guardian ahead of his appearance at the Guardian Hay festival, which opens tomorrow. Simon will be speaking at the festival on 30 May about his book The Corner, an account by him and his collaborator, Ed Burns, of a year spent observing life on the street in West Baltimore. The book, published in the US in 1997, became the basis of The Wire, along with Homicide, Simon's earlier book about the year he spent shadowing officers in the Baltimore Police Department.

Homicide was first published in the US in 1992, and The Corner came out in 1997 – but it is only now, after the wildfire success of The Wire, that the works are receiving attention in the UK, after publisher Canongate picked them up, republishing Homicide last year and The Corner last month.

Simon said his late-flowering literary success in Britain was "remarkable. Homicide was published very briefly in the UK in the 1990s, when it sold about 11 copies ... the UK has been very kind to The Wire."

Simon was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun when he took leave of absence to work with former police officer Burns on The Corner, an example of what he called "stand around and watch" journalism – slow-burn reporting that almost became ethnography. "The story changes the longer you stay in one place. After two weeks your view of the situation and people changes. After two months it might completely turn around. I did care for those people – and I wanted their lives to end better than in many cases they did."

The work is a lovingly detailed account of the lives of richly complex characters such as Gary McCullough, a former businessman whose life has become chaotic after becoming ensnared by heroin addiction; and his ex-wife Fran, a junkie who struggles to cling on to the vestiges of family life. It is a trenchantly political work, for it declines to see these otherwise overlooked people as mere statistics, but gives them vivid, human life.

And, despite his avowed admiration for Obama, Simon believes the new regime will do nothing to solve the US's drugs problems. "I do not believe that we have the stomach for serious change," he said. "The war on drugs is as disastrous as any government policy has been over the past 50 years, but I do not believe Obama and his people will use their political capital to end it ... If a policy failed this unequivocally in any other part of US life you would cashier the generals. But the drug problem oppresses the poor. If rich kids were wandering the streets stealing car radios we would not be so complacent. But it is easier to brutalise the poor and discard them. We are not a manufacturing economy any more and we don't need our least educated people, so we marginalise them. The cynicism of Reagan and Thatcher still applies."

On Treme, Simon said: "It picks up three months after the storm, and will deliver a story of people trying to pick up their lives and culture again. New Orleans is one of the most extraordinary cultural creations in the US in terms of almost every artform – and it is very vulnerable. The characters have to find their way back and try to solve the existential crisis that Katrina has left them."

The show will be, he said, a "homage to one of America's greatest achievements, African-American music. A thousand years from now, if anyone is talking about anything on this rotating orb, and they mention America, they might talk about constitutional government or democracy or baseball – but they will surely talk about blues and jazz. New Orleans is the cradle of all that."

The Guardian Hay festival this year foregrounds major religious figures. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, will speak to AN Wilson; and Desmond Tutu will deliver a lecture. Major literary figures speaking include Alan Bennett; the Swedish thriller writer Henning Mankell; novelists Anne Michaels, Rose Tremain and Sarah Waters; and poets Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy, the new poet laureate.

The science programme homes in on the politics of climate change, with highlights including Nicholas Stern and Anthony Giddens. The Guardian Hay festival runs from tomorrow until 31 May.