Double vision: Philippe Claudel is flying high in both fiction and film

Last week, at the Baftas, one award in particular gave quiet satisfaction to lovers of a cinema that favours heartfelt substance over frantic style. I've Loved You So Long took the honour for the best film not in English. Plenty of exacting critics find it something of a scandal that Kristin Scott Thomas, who unforgettably plays a woman coming home after 15 years in jail, will not be competing for an Oscar on Sunday evening in Los Angeles.

This week, an extraordinary novel appears in the UK. Brodeck's Report unfolds in the vividly-rendered landscape of a nightmarish folk-tale. In the aftermath of a genocidal war, a haunted survivor of death camps has returned to the village backwater where he grew up as a suspect immigrant. Soon he finds that – an outsider himself – he must compile a report to whitewash neighbours who have murdered an outlandish visitor, whose truth-telling stirred up a guilty rage. Written with an unsettling, painterly beauty, blessed or cursed with all the hallucinogenic clarity of a bad dream that lodges in the cellars of the mind, the novel transforms modern history into a fable that merges Kafka and the Grimms. This Gothic vision of simmering hate and fear drags us through the forests, mists and mountains of a world where "the wolves outnumber the lambs".

The director of the film is also the author of the novel. Philippe Claudel, from Nancy in eastern France, is a rooted child of those battled-over borderlands of Lorraine that open, as he says, "like a window on the centre of Europe". To call his amphibious excellence on page and screen alike a scarce event in the history of the arts would be a howling understatement. Of course, the movie business has always devoured fiction with wolf-like voracity. This year's Oscars will likely witness at-one-remove triumphs for writers such as Vikas Swarup (Slumdog Millionaire), Bernhard Schlink (The Reader) and Scott Fitzgerald (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Countless novelists have taken the studio dollar for screenplays, from Faulkner to Greene.

But true twin-track careers, with equal achievement in both fiction and direction, remain vanishingly rare. Interestingly, some of the strongest examples of novelists who also excel behind the lens have emerged from societies in rapid flux, where storytellers who seek to capture the turmoil around them have seized on every tool to hand: post-war Italy; post-colonial Africa; contemporary China (see boxes).

More common in our segmented culture are one-off experiments. In Britain, William Boyd took a break from the printed word to direct a Western Front movie, The Trench (1999). He has not gone back behind the camera. Hanif Kureishi, quite at home as a writer with screen-based storytelling from My Beautiful Laundrette through to Venus, has only once steered a film as well: London Kills Me (1991).

As for Claudel, he began to write film scenarios as a student in Nancy, producing shorts long before he had tried his hand at fiction. Now, a quarter-century later, we sit in a designer hotel in the West End – the sort of place this proud provincial loathes.

"I need my roots. I need my simple city," he says, weary after two years of travelling to promote both film and fiction. "I refuse to live in Paris ... Many, many publishers, critics and writers believe that Paris is the centre of the world. It's ridiculous; I like authenticity ... You know, many French writers are so pretentious – so pretentious. I try just to do my best." That spirit, of humanity and humility in the face of our erring, confused lives, has won him many admirers. It made his behind-the-lines First World War thriller Grey Souls – later filmed, with Claudel's screenplay, by his friend and colleague Yves Angelo – such a moving study in moral ambiguity. And it has endeared cinema audiences to I've Loved You so Long, as the writer for the first time took across-the-board responsibility for acting and images as well as words.

The newcomer trod carefully. "I composed this movie with a very classic style – with the directing, with the editing," he says. "I wanted to give time for the audience to enter deep inside this story ... My constant obsession was just to put my movie camera in the right place and to try to use this camera like a scalpel ... My desire was that the audience forget the camera movements, forget the director, forget the team of technicians, and just see the people on the screen, and use the screen like a mirror of our existence."

I ask him what seems like an obvious question: about the two painful homecomings that shape his novel and his film. In I've Loved You So Long, Juliette (Scott Thomas) surfaces from her long prison stretch after a terrible deed to live in Nancy again with her affectionate but anxious sister Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) – and to explore a foggy frontier terrain where guilt and innocence blur. In Brodeck's Report, Brodeck has been reduced to the status of a chained "dog", as a camp inmate from a hated race. But he chooses to collaborate in order to survive.

Back home, he has not only to come to terms with his violated wife's mute trauma and with the villagers' hatred of outsiders – symbolised by the fate of the mysterious "Anderer", the "other one", with his spooky artist's insight and garish carnival clothes. Brodeck, both victim and perpetrator, must confront his own culpability: "I chose to live, and my punishment is my life". A memory-flayed moral invalid, he thinks of himself as "perpetual prey", and of his broken fellow-survivors as "wounds that will never heal". Some family resemblance surely links these tales?

"I'm very happy that you observe that, because it was not the case in France," Claudel says. "Nobody – critics, journalists – asked me this question. I think the theme of guilt is always present in my novels and movies." As for homecoming after a profound trauma, "The question is: is it possible to take your place in the world again?" Both works ask us to answer that rather than delivering any glib instruction.

Claudel, who leaves judgment in the lap of his audiences, knows that teaching is not hectoring. Behind his work lie the 11 years he spent as a prison tutor: a world sketched in the film, where a character with that job swiftly grasps Juliette's plight. After a placement that proved his aptitude, Claudel virtually hammered on the local prison doors for three years, until a new governor took over and gave him the job. "All the people who came to my lessons were volunteers," he recalls. "For a teacher, these were the ideal conditions!"

At the same time, he read the philosopher Pascal, whose perception of humanity's double nature – as beast and angel at once – threads its way through his later creative career. Among the prisoners, he reports, "I gave up all my simple opinions about people, about guilt, about the necessity to judge others ... it would have been impossible for me to write a novel like this one or Grey Souls, to make a movie like I've Loved You So Long, if I hadn't been in jail".

If the movie wins, and breaks, hearts through its scrupulous psychological realism, the novel leads into the trackless woods of myth and fable. Claudel sets out the challenge: "Is it possible to compose, at the beginning of the 21st century, a novel about genocide without making a direct reference to the Nazi genocide?" The Third Reich's version may have been the "climax of horror. But before, you had all the other genocides, and after in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, in Darfur now." Besides, Brodeck's Report "was not a novel about the Holocaust. It was a novel about the aftermath of the Holocaust."

Taken together, novel and film dwell in a murky universe where evil encroaches on good as often as invading armies have redrawn the frontiers of Claudel's own Lorraine. "It's a paradox," he says. "I like to write about our complexity, our tragedy – about our double nature. At the same time, in my life I'm constantly optimistic. It's so strange to me to live in these two dimensions."

Fluid moves between separate dimensions seem to suit him. As he shuttles between movies and novels, "I'm a little bit lost between these two ways. But I like to be lost." In a novel like the intensely visualised Brodeck's Report, "I try to use words to build a very precise image ... I see the scene in my mind, and I just try to translate this vision." Yet "When I write a screenplay, I use a very basic language, without a poetic dimension". This rare amphibian, garlanded in two distinct creative elements, will not be giving up on either soon: "My real luck is to have the opportunity to explore both ways."

At home on page and screen: three novelist-directors

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Although better known as a poet, Pasolini had a shocking impact on 1950s Italy with his raw prose fiction before he turned to direction. His dialect-rich slices of life from Rome's lower depths, 'Ragazzi di Vita' and 'Una Vita Violenta', earned the wrath of church, state and Communist Party, but opened doors into the film business. The world of these stories inspired the movies that made his name in the early 1960s, 'Accattone' and 'Mamma Roma'. Although he later won global fame – and notoriety – with film adaptations of sources from St Matthew's Gospel to de Sade, Pasolini never stopped writing. Murdered in 1975, he left behind an unfinished epic novel that embraces the great themes of his career: 'Petrolio'.

Ousmane Sembène

Often dubbed "the father of African cinema", Sembène – a Muslim Wolof from Senegal – began his literary career with a pioneering novel of the migrant experience of racism in Marseille, 'The Black Docker', in 1956. Later novels of West African life include 'God's Bits of Wood', 'Harmattan', 'Last of the Empire' and 'Xala'. After a short film, 'The Wagoner', in 1966 he directed 'La Noire de ...' – often seen as the first feature-length film by a sub-Saharan African to gain general release. In 1975 he filmed 'Xala', and among his later features were 'Ceddo', 'Guelwaar' and 'Moolaadé' in 2004: a prize-winner at Cannes. Never afraid of controversy, Sembène in this final work looked at the effect of genital mutilation in rural African society.

Xiaolu Guo

Creators who switch between prose fiction, screenwriting and film direction are less unusual in contemporary China than elsewhere; the novelist Zhu Wen has directed three features. From a small fishing village in the south, Xiaolu Guo went to the Beijing film school and has since worked prolifically across both media. Her feature 'How is Your Fish Today?', one of seven she has written and directed, won the grand prix at the Créteil festival in France. In fiction, novels such as 'Village of Stone' and '20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth' were followed by 'A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers' – written in English. Her novel 'UFO in Her Eyes' is out in Britain this month, with a new film – 'She, a Chinese' – also due this year.

'I've Loved You So Long' is released on DVD from Lions Gate; 'Brodeck's Report', translated by John Cullen, is published by MacLehose Press