DAVID Harsent has two magnificent cats.

The grey one of the Maine Coon pair follows him around the house like a silent yet prominent sidekick as the writer goes through the history of his life so far.

With their unaffected way and natural hints of gallantry, the cats just seem to suit who he is.

David lives in a stylish, spacious cul-de-sac house in Barnes with his wife of 17 years, actress Julia Watson, and their 15-year-old daughter, Hannah.

Moving from West Kensington 12 years ago to the suburbs' wasn't an easy decision for the couple, but now, he says: "It's quite nice just to be able to get on with his or her work.

"Barnes is wonderfully uninteruptive in that way."

Writers' partners, he says, have to get used to them staring out the window.

"We're working when we're staring out the window, although sometimes we're just staring out the window."

Writing under various pseudonyms (Sam Lawrence, David Lawrence, David Pascoe and Jack Curtis) David has written numerous thrillers and scripts for comedy and drama in film and television. As David Harsent, he has penned nine volumes of poetry (plus several limited editions), a novel and librettos for six operas.

All that work, most recently his ninth poetry collection, Legion, published last year by Faber, has paid off.

In 2005 the book of image evoking war poems won the Forward Prize, one of Britain's top three poetry prizes, and was shortlisted for the other two, the Whitbread poetry award and the TS Eliot Prize.

In 2002 his collection, Marriage, was also shortlisted for the TS Eliot and the Forward Prizes.

But David refuses to confirm the suggestion that this changes his standing as a poet.

"It does change your profile, more people may know of me because of it, but my work was not a secret to people who read modern verse.

"Whatever it was prior to winning the Forward has not changed. People suddenly do not think higher of me. But there is something special about being shortlisted for the three major prizes," he concedes.

There is also genuine modesty about his more humble beginnings, which are not necessary, but good fodder for a poet.

After revealing that he didn't go to university, he even borrows someone else's words to explain.

"This man said to me, it wasn't for the likes of us'. And I thought, yes, I understand that. It wasn't for the likes of us," David adds.

After being born in Bovey Tracey, Devon, David grew up in a house full of women in Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire.

He didn't meet his father, a bricklayer, until he was six years old. "He had been off shooting people in the western desert."

At the age of 15, David published his first poem.

"But you didn't own up to writing poetry where I came from," so when he left school to go work in a book store in Aylesbury, it was a move that sparked a poet who otherwise might not have been.

"I was always writing, particularly at that time.

"Then I met someone at the book store who encouraged me a good deal," he says of the early years, when he worked while publishing poems "here and there".

David was still working in the shop when he put out his first collection, A Violent Country, in 1969.

Shortly after, he won a bursary from the Arts Council and following a decade of employment, quit the shop.

"I lived on that money for about a year." A whole year to write poetry, he must have produced a lot work. No, he says.

"I was given all the time in the world but didn't write as much."

David's personal life was a different story then, too. He was married to his first wife and living in a two-up, two-down house with their three children, two boys and a girl and with no inside loo.

He remains close to all three children, and talks about that time with no obvious signs of discomfort.

"The loo was in the garden. It was difficult in winter. One severe winter the kids got gastroenteritis and it snowed quite heavily." But he says, they weren't unhappy or suffering. "It was just kind of poor accommodation." A bit like Little House on the Prairie? "Not quite as golden," he says, brushing the back of his full head of white hair.

After one year of living off the bursary he had to look for a job. "I didn't know anyone who made a living out of writing poetry," he laments, so he chose publishing and after 12 years in various jobs with different companies he became so successful and hardworking that there was no time left in the day to write. So he bravely left the publishing world.

"I thought, I no longer have an expense account. I no longer have a company car and I don't fly the Concorde back and forth to New York anymore.

"But what I did have was my own life back, in a sort of way. I had responsibilities, let's put it that way, and I needed to find a way to put some bread on the table.

"I decided to become a writer. I was always a writer, but it was a challenge because I had to think, how can I write in a way that will make money?

"Poetry ain't it. I used to read thrillers for pleasure and there is something about the structure of a thriller that links to the structure in poetry."

Crows' Parliament, his first thriller, did well. At the same time "bizarrely", as he puts it, he got commissioned by Harry Birtwistle to write an opera.

He and the composer weren't even acquaintances, but their names had crossed years earlier in The Observer when a journalist linked Mr Birtwistle's opera, Punch and Judy, with David's latest poetry collection at the time, Mr Punch.

After Gawain, which was for the Royal Opera House, the poet and crime fiction writer, who had actually written two opera pieces previous to his collaboration with Bertwistle, added librettist to his list of trades.

He said he jumped at the chance to work with Bertwistle, because he admired the composer tremendously and music had always been a large part of his life.

A manuscript of Minotaur, the current opera David is working on with Bertwistle for the Royal Opera House in 2008, lies atop a stack of art books in his top floor study.

"If I were a rich man poetry would always be a part of it, that is the part that defines me. It is the central part of my life as a writer. But music would also have a large part to play in it," he says. I ask if writing for opera comes to him as viscerally as poetry. Yes, but the process of writing an opera changes as it goes along.

He writes the libretto then they make a few minor changes, but the real test comes when Bertwistle starts to compose. "It offers new opportunities.

"The pressure of his creativity starts to tell on mine." When the creative work is all said and done there is "some mopping up to do" before pre-production.

I'm floored to hear that the whole process takes as long as it does.

"From first notion to first night, it takes four to five years." Recently he was made a distinguished writing fellow at Hallam University in Sheffield, where he goes every other week to visit with creative writing students.

In addition to the opera, he is working on a new collection of poems, a novel called The Wormhole and a book of selected poems for Faber due out in 2007. However, it is a piece of crime fiction that is taking up most of his time at the moment. All the while he is keeping an eye on the upcoming production of In the Zone, a dramatic version of Legion that he wrote while the poetry book was in proof.

Legion, by David Harsent is publishes by Faber (£8.99).