It’s 9am in a central London hotel and George Saunders is looking remarkably chipper for someone who has had four hours sleep and, thanks to jet lag, only two and a half the night before. On Tuesday evening the Texas-born writer won the Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo, and the party at his publishers went on until 2.30am. Did he cut loose?

“Oh yes, I’m not one of those monkish writers at all,” he says, even though he has the wholesome look of a man who drinks carrot juice for breakfast. “Although I do find prizes very anxiety-inducing: the disappointment if you don’t win, the need to make a speech if you do. But then I’m an anxious person. I’ve been anxious since the womb.”

Lincoln in the Bardo is Saunders’s debut novel, although he already has a peerless reputation in the States as a writer of dystopian-flavoured, satirical short stories full of unhinged incident and unexpected compassion. Lincoln in the Bardo gives full reign to his reality-bending powers in the way it takes a true event – the night a grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln visited his 11-year-old son Willie, newly dead from typhus, in Oak Hill cemetery – and uses it as the launch pad for a hallucinatory tour-de-force told through the fragmented voices of 166 narrators, many of whom are unquiet ghosts who haunt the same graveyard in a state of purgatory.