Is the novel dying? It’s a debate that should probably be dropped given the 85 years people have spent weighing in on it. "Replace the word novel with the word film," suggests Colm Tóibín, arguably Ireland’s foremost living novelist, "then you’d actually get somewhere."

Tóibín is confident that during our interview, "the same ten bad films are playing in the same malls everywhere in the world: they’re not memorable, they’re of no use and they won’t survive." I don’t doubt his conviction, but Tóibín, for all the melancholy weight of his prose writing, makes for surprisingly jocular company, and you can never be completely sure he isn’t pulling your leg.

We soon start talking about Jonathan Franzen, as is the way of all literary-themed discussion at the moment. "The arrival of someone like Franzen has been a big deal," he says, rising to pour some sparkling water, "he’s not redefining the novel, he’s just using it. Getting all the business down right from the beginning: characters, things they do, funny ones, serious ones, love, family, hate, fights – and putting it all into a book."

From here Tóibín segues into familiar territory. "What’s happened in England – the re-creation of the country, multicultural Britain, was not done by politicians or journalists, or on TV. It was done by Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, redefining the public space: it was done by novelists."

Emigration, identity and the significance of ‘home’ are common themes in Tóibín’s fiction. His last novel, the Costa Prize-winning Brooklyn, followed a naïve but determined Irish woman from Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford (where the novelist himself was born in 1955) across the Atlantic to America. Yet while the narrative of departure may be familiar in Irish history, today, the island has become a point of arrival. I wonder if the widespread resistance to immigration in Ireland seems a little hypocritical, in a country where almost everyone knows someone who has moved abroad.

"If a Chinese kid is born in Ireland they are not automatically granted Irish citizenship, and that is wrong, simply wrong," he responds, explaining that nobody will let him talk about the subject in the Irish press because, well, it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the economy.

"It takes a long time for a country to get used to the idea that outsiders nourish a place. It was very disappointing to realise that Ireland couldn’t do this. I think it takes a lot of leadership, at every level, to tell people why you cannot do this to others, because you end up doing it to yourselves, because of course they will be Irish.

"People think because there’s such a history of bad British landlords that an Irish landlord should be really nice. I’ll tell you now, there’s nothing worse that an Irish landlord, nothing meaner. Never mind an immigration official."

Tóibín’s new book is a collection of nine short stories entitled The Empty Family. "There’s a story called ‘The Street,’ which attempts to dramatise the stuff we’ve been talking about. It’s about the Pakistani community in Barcelona." A fluent Spanish and Catalan speaker who spends a portion of his year in Spain, Tóibín has taken an interest in the region ever since his first novel, The South (1992), in which an Irish woman moves to Barcelona and falls in love with a local painter.

"Catalan nationalism is so self-consuming and interested in itself, they didn’t realise that vast numbers of Pakistanis had arrived and recreated a dead part of the city, making it clean, safe and wonderful. They add so much life. I call them New Catalans in the book, and people have accosted me, saying, ‘Surely you can’t be serious?’ But I am."

Saying what others won’t is a striking aspect of Tóibín’s writing. The Blackwater Lightship (1999) is the story of a gay man suffering from AIDS who must reveal both his sexuality and his illness to his mother and grandmother. A gay man himself, Tóibín had to realise the impact this story was likely to have. "I published that book while my mother was still alive, so, you can imagine! There were things in the book that had never been said, and all of a sudden the whole town could read them."

I explained that the idea of my own family, also from Ireland, reading a sex scene I’d written, was nothing short of horrifying. Yet he was surprisingly optimistic about the need to write these things down. "The danger is in censoring yourself, because if you stop writing, you stop. It was like I was locked in a space, and the book became a way of trying to chisel out an opening for myself, I wasn’t just writing a novel, I was trying to breathe. It became a raid on the unsayable. But it’s funny how people handle things, you’d be surprised."

I ask if writing women’s lives has become the default perspective in his writing. "Not really, I’ve written six novels and it’s split pretty much evenly between men and women, though having said that, I now have real trouble writing straight men. I can’t see them, feel them or get them into my system. It’s a big problem."

After tonight’s stopover in Cambridge, lecturing on English poets in Ireland during the sixteenth century, I ask, what’s next? "I’m lecturing on Austen in December, and after Christmas I’ll go back to Princeton to teach. Then in June, July and August I’ll work hard on fiction in Spain…" He pauses – probably aware of the fact I’m thinking, ‘and I’ve got a bloody dissertation to write sitting in my cold north Cambridge pit’ – adding, "there’s no perfect life y’know. I often think I should be living in Ireland all the time working on novels, but then I get a letter from somewhere like this asking me to come and speak and I think ‘Fuck it, there’s something on my mind, it’s a distraction but I’m going to do it.’ And that’s the way it goes, there’s no perfect way to live."

Tóibín’s new book The Empty Family is published by Viking and is out now.