Lucy Hughes-Hallett: 'I'd take tea with Hitler'

Lucy Hughes-Hallett arrives on the dot of nine. "I was too excited to sleep," she says, on the morning after winning the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize for The Pike, her biography of the Italian poet and progenitor of fascism Gabriele D'Annunzio. "But it was nice just to be able to lie in bed thinking about it. While you're waiting for the result, you're too tense to think about anything."

Recognition has come relatively late: Hughes-Hallett, after a bit of counting on her fingers, tells me she is 61. "It would have been lovely to have got it earlier, but I suppose I should have been writing a bit faster." This is her third book. In 1990, she published Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, examining how Cleopatra has been endlessly reimagined over the centuries. Then, in 2004, came Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen, tracing the lives – and, more importantly, the afterlives – of eight figures, including Achilles, Odysseus, Francis Drake and Garibaldi.

Why has the rate of production been so leisurely? "I've always been doing other things as well," she says. "I've done a lot of journalism, and was a fairly full-time mother for a lot of the time." She and her publisher husband, Dan Franklin, live in London and have twin girls, now in their 20s. She doesn't, as some littérateurs do, resent the time spent on journalism, and says she never wanted to be in a situation where she had to produce a book every couple of years. "Writers aren't like plumbers. If you're a plumber, you fix one person's boiler in the morning, then you go and fix another in the afternoon. I didn't want to write a book unless I had something new to say – and it was good to live a little in between."

Hughes-Hallett began as a feature writer on Vogue, where she wrote long profiles: "a wonderful apprenticeship for biography writing". In her 30s, she became the London Evening Standard's TV critic. "My deadline was eight in the morning, so I used to get up at six, write my piece, and dictate it to the copytakers. I felt I'd earned my living before breakfast, which meant I could embark on a book."

The D'Annunzio biography – a vivid portrait of the womanising, warmongering writer whose self-promotion and ultra-nationalism prefigured Mussolini – came directly out of her book on heroes. He was a candidate for inclusion and features in the chapter on Garibaldi, but outgrew the confines of a multiple biography. "Five months had gone by and I'd written 50,000 words," she recalls, "so I put those away in a drawer."

What fascinated her about D'Annunzio was that he appeared to be a hinge between 19th-century romanticism and 20th-century totalitarianism. "As a schoolboy, D'Annunzio was a great admirer of Byron and Shelley, both of whom he thought he resembled," she says. "He pranced around wearing a ring he claimed belonged to Byron."

But the Romantic idea that truth was beauty and beauty truth had become perverted during in the 19th century, with abstract ideals mattering more to some artists than the common lot of humanity. When D'Annunzio heard reports of the bloody riots in Italian cities in the 1890s, all he cared about was that Benvenuto Cellini's statue of Perseus had been struck by a stone. "He couldn't give a toss about the humans who had been hurt," Hughes-Hallett says.

D'Annunzio was instrumental in dragging Italy into the first world war, in a bid to win territory from the fading Austro-Hungarian empire; and after the war, he led the motley band that occupied the town of Fiume on the coast of what is now Croatia, establishing himself as Duce. Eventually, Italian forces bombarded the occupiers into submission and he retired to Lake Garda, where he lived for another 18 years occupying himself with his favourite pursuits – sex and writing – and suffering from syphilis. A baleful end, briskly dealt with by Hughes-Hallett.

Many writers have judged D'Annunzio to be reprehensible, but she was determined to avoid moral judgments. "Disapproval is not an interesting response," she writes. So how did she end up feeling about him? Is he the type of man she would go out for dinner with? "Oh yes, I'd love to have dinner with him. But I remember my husband once saying to me in shock, 'I think you'd have gone to tea with Hitler, wouldn't you?' And the answer is yes, of course. I am interested in the bad guys as well as the good ones."

She was also determined not to write a conventional birth-to-death biography. "I have," she writes, "tried to avoid the falsification inevitable when a life – made up, as most lives are, of contiguous but unconnected strands – is blended to fit into a homogeneous narrative." Instead, the chronology darts about: some sections of D'Annunzio's life are covered in great detail, others only sketched; and descriptive passages are interleaved with chapters that read like notes from a diary. "The form was every bit as important as the content," she says. "I knew I had a great subject. What was thrilling was finding what I could do with it. There is no excuse for non-fiction to be any more boring than fiction, and a lot of biographers and historians should go home and read a few novels. There is still far too much non-fiction that begins at the beginning and plods through to the end."

D'Annunzio was certainly a brave choice of subject. "The majority of people like reading books about David Beckham and Queen Victoria, and I knew it was going to be tough for the publisher," she admits. Her UK publisher remained supportive as deadlines whooshed past, but not everyone was so positive. "The Canadian publisher who had published Heroes was in town soon after that book came out," she recalls. "He asked me what I was going to write next, and I said, 'I'm going to write about an Italian poet.' I've never actually seen a person's face fall so far and so fast."

And her next book? Now that she is established as a prize-winning biographer, who will her next subject be? "I'm writing a novel. I'm going to be the world's oldest first-time novelist." I fear my face falls. Won't that confuse the new readers attracted to her books because of the prize? "It probably will. They haven't said so, but I imagine it would be easier for my agent and publisher to build on this if I were doing another similar book. But I'm pretty pleased with this book. I think I've learned how to do this, and I'd like to try something else now."

Just don't tell the Canadian publisher.

The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio – Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War is published by Fourth Estate, price £12.99