Phillippa Boston talks to John Hopkins, who has settled in the Oxfordshire countryside after leaving the literary whirl of sixties Morocco

Morocco is a magical country. You either love it or hate it. When writer John Hopkins arrived in Morocco, in 1962, with his friend, Joe McPhilllips, they both fell in love with the place.

"I went there for one year and stayed 17 and the guy that I went there with - he's still out there."

Hopkins's diaries of the years he spent in Morocco, The Tangier Diaries, were published by Arcadia Books in 1997. Earlier this year Arcadia published a novel, based on the first short story he published, called All I Wanted Was Company.

For the last 18 years John Hopkins and his wife Ellen-Ann have lived in an enchanting, early 18th-century parsonage in Oxfordshire. You could not get much further away from Tangier. Hopkins and his wife swapped the eclectic Anglo-American society and the exotic North African city for this beautiful house on the banks of the Thames.

The house was left to the National Trust on the understanding that it would be let to an American writer, artist or academic. After leaving Tangier, newly-married with a child on the way, Hopkins and Ellen-Ann spent a few years living in London until a burgeoning family and fears of lead pollution had them looking for a place in the country.

Eighteen years later, their three sons grown and all but flown the nest, Ellen-Ann jokes that it would take Semtex to get them out.

I ask Hopkins whether it was a shock to find himself in England after all those years in North Africa.

"I've been here longer than I lived there, so I'm pretty well acclimatised now," he says with a grin. "Anywhere would have been a shock after 17 years in Morocco."

During the years spent in Oxfordshire, Hopkins has published five books, another is finished and due out next year and another is about to start. They have been fruitful years, full of books and children.

The previous 17 years, for the most part spent in Morocco, were years of travel and friends, spent in the company of many famous and renowned cultural figures. Hopkins mixed with the great, the good and the mesmerisingly bad in Morocco, as his Diaries testify.

"You met people like Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, people I'd never have met if I'd lived in London or Paris or New York. Tangier is like Burford. You can go to a cocktail party and meet everybody there in one go."

There is, however, no denying a huge gap between the nature of English society and that of Tangier, whatever the surface similarities may be.

"You were thrown together with all kinds of different people, from different countries, speaking different languages, in very unusual circumstances. Tangier had a very international community made up of people who had all spent the first half of their life somewhere else and had gone to Tangier for whatever reason. So everybody had lots of stories to tell. It was paradise for a young writer, meeting all those people."

The word paradise occurs during one passage in the Diaries as Hopkins describes a journey into the desert. As he arrives in each, more primitive, settlement, he looks back on the settlement before as a kind of paradise. Looking back now, I ask him, does Tangier seem some sort of paradise?

"I became a writer out there. I lived a very creative life out there. Although I didn't get that much writing done or books published, it was a very formative period for me."

An extract from the diaries, dated December 31, 1977: "There will come a time when the West, exhausted from its insatiable thirst for material riches, will turn to countries like Morocco to re-learn the lessons of the spirit."

We laugh at the fact that the materialism of 1977 was a picnic compared to that of the late eighties and nineties. But what he wrote then has come to pass. There is an increasing interest in spirituality as an answer to the emptiness of the material world. It was almost impossible to open a magazine or newspaper this spring and summer without seeing another article on the wonders, the treasures, the beauty, the fabrics - whatever - of Morocco.

John Hopkins is very happy living his English country life. He returns to Morocco often, most recently to the Paul Bowles memorial in February when he spoke about his literary mentor and friend, who died before Christmas.

Next year sees the publication of The South American Diaries. With this finished. he turns now to the conflict between Christianity and Islam. Reluctantly, I take myself away from the rural idyll and leave him to his contemplation.