I have just finished a stint as a judge of this year’s Man Booker Prize for fiction: a somewhat sobering four months involving three judging meetings, the reading of over 100 novels, countless telephone calls from newspapers' arts correspondents and – finally – the selection of a winner, D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little. Theoretically the experience of reading three contemporary UK novels a day for most of the summer ought to qualify one to make all kinds of dazzling pronouncements on the ‘state’ of writing in the UK. In fact, it does nothing of the sort. Just as biography is, of its nature, a snapshot – an individual intelligence appraised by another individual intelligence at a single point in time – so 100 UK novels represent only a fragment of the national literary consciousness, even if (as I rather doubt) such a thing truly exists.

That said, it would be odd if, in the reading of practically every significant novel published in the UK in 2003, certain themes and tendencies didn’t predominate (it was notable, for example, that in book after book the mostly loudly disparaged professional class was journalists). One of the most striking tendencies of the original longlist of 23 novels was the variety of distinctive ‘regional’ English locations on display – novels that were not only set beyond the metropolitan corridor formed by the M25 motorway but were clearly making an aesthetic virtue out of their distance from the heart of literary UK.

Thus Carol Birch’s Turn Again Home – my own favourite among the books submitted – was a multi-generational Manchester saga; John Murray’s Jazz etc took ineradicable root in its author’s native Cumbria; while Julia Darling’s The Taxi-Driver’s Daughter was similarly attached to Newcastle. Pride of place in this pantheon went to Clare Morrall’s Astonishing Splashes of Colour, a first novel by a Birmingham school-teacher which got as far as the final six-book shortlist. Taken together, they suggest that the ‘provincial’ strain in British writing, observable at any time over the past ten years, is rapidly becoming one of its dominant forms.

Provincialism, of course, is as old as the English novel itself. Middlemarch is a provincial novel, and so is Jude the Obscure and so, up to a point, is Sons and Lovers. In the immediately post-war era, William Cooper’s genre-defining Scenes from Provincial Life was popularly supposed to have authenticated a whole tradition of out-of-London fiction, soon carried on down by John Wain’s Hurry on Down and Kingsley Amis’s. Strictly speaking the emergence of the Cooper/Wain/Amis axis was a false dawn. Cooper’s next novel, delayed for many years by the libel lawyers, was called Scenes from Metropolitan Life. Lucky Jim ends with its hero, Jim Dixon, waiting eagerly on a Midlands' station platform for the London train. He would shortly be followed by his creator. The true post-war provincials were working-class novelists such as Alan Sillitoe (Nottingham) or Sid Chaplin (Tyneside) together with such individual works as, to take a few obvious examples, David Storey’s Booker-winning Savile or Graham Swift’s Fenland epic Waterland.

How to account for the further renaissance of the past ten years and the arrival of writers like Birch, Darling and Murray (not quite the explosion that it sounds, as Birch and Murray’s careers began way back in the 1980s)? On the one hand, there is an economic explanation. For the majority of modern writers in the UK London, to which in former eras they would have been drawn by a kind of natural law, is simply too expensive a place in which to live and work. Provincial cities, often harbouring universities with sympathetic literature departments (see, for example, Norwich, Sheffield and Warwick) seem a much better bet. Then again, recent upheavals on the UK publishing scene, such as the extinction of the mid-list (usually defined as respectable literary novels that don’t sell very well) has meant that many writers have been forced to seek commercial sponsors outside the major London firms. Jazz etc is published by a two-person operation in Northumberland. Astonishing Splashes of Colour comes from the Tindal Street Press, a fictional collective based in Birmingham. Following in the wake of these regional initiatives are the support networks aimed at creating, or in most cases enhancing, local literary communities. Only last month, for example, the London Bookseller trade magazine reported the unveiling of a ‘writer’s portal’ in the North East, an online database holding information and contact details for over 50 local talents.

At the same time novels of the kind mentioned above would not be written unless their writers felt that some greater point was being made by their choice of setting, that the stories they were in pursuit of were more likely to be found here in the English hinterlands rather than in the London postal districts. John Murray’s earlier novel Reiver Blues, for example, is a novel whose Cumbrian backdrop is an integral part of its scheme, a meditation on the idea of the border and the debatable land which gradually moves away from the geographical divisions between England and Scotland to the occasional fantastical divides of modern Central Europe. Inevitably much of this new brand of writing from the UK is ‘provincial’ in the negative sense – narrowly focused and rather glorifying in its sequestration. But the metropolitan English novel, that immensely stylised artefact set variously in the Hampstead drawing room, the Brixton squat, the Soho loft or beneath the racket of the Westway, has spent the past decade and a half in a state of utter exhaustion. With a few distinctive exceptions, new UK talent is more often than not making itself felt beyond the strait-jacket of the M25. Mysteriously, the possession of a London post code has ceased to be one of the more useful weapons in the UK writer’s armoury.

D. J. Taylor is a novelist and biographer. His centenary biography of George Orwell, Orwell: The Life, was published in 2003.