Not that Gail Jones is aligning herself with writers like, say, Joseph Conrad, the subject of her own latest novel, One Another.

But that book did, as it happens, come about almost through serendipity.

Helen, an Australian student at Cambridge, is trying to complete her thesis on Joseph Conrad, but has left her manuscript on a train, and is distracted by family tragedy and an increasingly unpleasant boyfriend.

She's drifting, in a way, but also anchored by thoughts of Conrad, the writer she's become obsessed with throughout her studies.

Ironically, Jones had never been much interested in the work of Conrad, beyond the obvious classics like Heart of Darkness.

The seed of her own book was a writer's residency she wasn't much looking forward to in Tasmania two years ago. Recently grief-stricken, Jones was feeling low, and not at all sure she could write anything.

All she wanted, in fact, was to see Conrad's boat in the Derwent River - the rusted, desiccated remains of the only boat the great writer, who was a merchant marine for the first half of his career, ever captained.

Seeing the wreck turned out to be a moving and formative experience.

"At first I thought it was the shape of the cradle," Jones says.

"It's got this beautiful elliptical shape, it's very close to the edge of the river so you can walk out to it, especially when the tide is down, and it's covered in sort of muck.

"And then I thought it actually looked like a body to me, it looked like a splayed open chest or someone lying on their back with the water of the Derwent ... So this weird combination of a very stiff shape, a ruined shape with the tremulous water in the centre, and I found that very moving. I wasn't even sure why."

She drove back to the studio she had rented, wanting to learn more about Conrad, and his connection to Australia. Turning on the television, she learned that Putin had just invaded Ukraine.

"One of the things I did know is that Conrad was born in the Ukraine...and that all of his life he spoke with a Ukrainian accent," she says. "I just remember watching this news and it looked a bit dire and thinking gosh, that's exactly how Conrad must have spoken....

"That was the point I thought, I do have to take this a bit more seriously, and I should really do some reading up on Conrad."

A much-awarded author of 10 novels, Jones is also a teacher of literature, and has long been interested in how we interact with what we read - how reading shapes lives and prompts decisions.

"I've been really interested in how we attach to texts and to writers and that feeling of tenderness and affection that it arouses in us when we read something that moves us," she says.

"I know that when you're a critic, and when you're a student, you're not meant to write about that. That's meant to be bracketed off, or even disqualified as a sort of source of meaning, really. But in the experience of reading, there are these complicated emotional transactions and transactions of memory, like things being triggered and recalled.

"So I thought, actually, I'd like to write something about reading Conrad.

"I absolutely had not gone to Tassie thinking I would write a book about Conrad, and I just started reading his works again and looking at his life, feeling incredibly moved by his suffering."

Conrad himself spent many years ruminating on the past; Jones became fascinated by the fact that Conrad's life was cleanly divided between sailing and writing. After a fraught maritime career, he moved to England to become a writer at the age of 36, and died 30 years later.

"He literally, after having this incredibly adventurous life of really hard work, sits still for 30 years," she says. "And basically keeps on flipping back to his own life and gathering in his past experiences and making sense of them.

"And so my message was much more intuitive and much more random than it sounds. Someone said, 'God, how did you plan this novel?' And I didn't, I had an image and the image was of the wreck. And the idea almost that Conrad's body had come to rest in Australia. And then I discovered he made six trips to Australia, that he wrote most of his first book at Circular Quay. I was knocked out by that, I had not known that."

Her protagonist Helen - beset with grief and inertia, maddening in her inability to move beyond an unsuitable relationship, to reconcile herself to a lost manuscript - finds herself constantly ruminating on Conrad's life, his motifs and obsessions and how her experiences relate to his.

"In a sense, she becomes a writer by thinking about him as a real person, rather than thinking about him as a project," she says. "I'm really interested in the psychology of reading, and in what it means to look at black words on a white page and burst into tears ... I think I've been very changed by my reading."