When writer Nicholas Evans travels to Oxford from his home in Devon for the Literary Festival next month, the trip will be meticulously planned. Not because the author of the best-selling novel The Horse Whisperer is some sort of control freak, rather it is that his life depends on it.

Two-and-a-half years ago he and his wife, the singer/songwriter Charlotte Gordon Cumming, accidentally picked and ate poisonous mushrooms and ended up in hospital, fighting for their lives.

Left with badly malfunctioning kidneys, he has to endure five hours of dialysis every other day, which makes travelling a constant challenge.

“It is tremendously restricting. I have always loved research trips because it is great thinking time, but I find them tricky now. I have to plot my travelling around where I can get dialysis.”

His other regret is that visiting his daughter Lauren, one of three children from his first marriage, is now fraught with problems, as she lives in Kenya.

He was half-way through writing his latest novel, The Brave, when he became ill and it was a long time before he was able to resume.

He and Charlotte, who met in 1997 and have an eight-year-old son Finlay, are both on the kidney transplant waiting list.

“Occasionally I feel a bit fed up but we are jolly lucky to be alive, as I keep reminding myself,” he said.

Having spent three years studying law at St Edmund Hall, he knows Oxford well.

“Physically, the place has changed an awful lot. If I ever drive in, I get hopelessly lost but have tremendously fond memories of it,” he said.

During his time as an undergraduate, he was heavily involved in theatre.

“I thought I wanted to be an actor. Thank God I discovered while at Oxford that I wasn’t very good at it because I saved myself a lifetime of misery,” he said.

The highlight of his short thespian phase was playing Angelo in Measure by Measure at the Oxford Playhouse, directed by fellow student Elija Moshinsky, now a leading light in opera. He began his writing career while at university, including a book review for this newspaper, and landed a job on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. He moved to London as a researcher for current affairs television programme Weekend World.

Despatched to America for a year to cover the presidential elections of 1976, his enthusiasm for the country, which had started as a boy, grew. He explained: “I was addicted to Westerns, whether it was books, films or those corny old TV shows.

“Through going to primaries, I got to know all the little towns in the mid-West. It was a real education to discover that America isn’t just New York, LA and Miami but 100 different countries in between.”

His admiration for the US is reflected in the fact that The Horse Whisperer, his second and third novels The Loop and The Smoke Jumper, and now The Brave, are all set in Montana, a state he has visited frequently.

His breakthrough came after Robert Redford decided to make a film of and star in The Horse Whisperer and the book notched up sales of around 15 million.

In The Brave, he subtly explores the theme of disillusionment, focusing on the idea that heroes rarely turn out to be how they are imagined The main character is Tommy, a cowboy-loving young boy who idolises an actor in a TV series set in the Wild West.

His older sister falls in love with the actor and they move to Hollywood, rescuing him from a miserable existence at boarding school, but he gradually discovers things are not as they seem.

This runs in parallel with the tale of Tommy as an adult and the events that force him into confronting his painful past.

The story was inspired by watching the TV news after the Iraq invasion.

“I saw George Bush on his ranch in Texas wearing a stetson and cowboy boots and looking every inch the all-American hero.

“It got me thinking about how the legacy of the Wild West still informs our notions of bravery and heroism,” he said.

Not surprisingly, his near-death experience has had a profound effect on him and his work.

“When I sat down to finish writing The Brave, I was a different person because I knew a lot more about the preciousness and vulnerability of life,” he said.

* The Brave is published by Little, Brown at £17.99. Nicholas Evans will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on April 9 (see www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com.)