Back in 1974, with blow-dried hair falling to the shoulders of his crushed-velvet suit - looking, as he has put it, like a bit of a Bee Gee - a young Martin Amis ascended the podium at a polite gathering in London and accepted the Somerset Maugham Award for best first novel. "Well, Martin, I said to myself," Amis recalls, "you're just going to have to get used to this."

Twenty-eight years later - 28 years that have brought a dozen books, near-religious critical devotion, a receding hairline and many a Booker snub and Whitbread freeze-out - Amis arrived in Edinburgh to receive only his second literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, a gong that comes with much history, quiet kudos and a very small cheque.

"This is practically a novelty for me," he said. "As Kingsley used to say, literary awards are fine when you actually win them."

Amis took the Tait Black biography award for his memoir, Experience; the fiction prize went to Zadie Smith, who enjoys the searing-young-talent status in Brit Lit once accorded to Amis, and while she revels in the acclaim for White Teeth, he has been as often in the headlines for his staggeringly expensive dentristry - "squandering my advances on a Liberace smile," as he puts it in the memoir.

The two writers held a wide-ranging discussion at the George Square Theatre on their adventures in the book trade, with Amis noting how times had changed in the years between their first books' appearing.

"Zadie's success is unparalleled and of a different era," he said. "When The Rachel Papers for which Amis won the Somerset Maugham Award came out, you got reviewed and that was that, and you went back to work. There was none of the collateral activity that you get now: no readings, no tours, no parties."

Although he doesn't often read his juniors, he had praise for Smith's novel, which she wrote when she was just 23.

"I was with the extended family last summer, and there were three or four different people reading White Teeth, aged between about 15 and 60, and I thought, oh, I'd better give it a go. After a page or two, I said, yeah, she's got it."

Smith, who seemed a little awestruck to be sharing a stage with an idol, talked about the barrage of hype that greeted her book and the difficulties of precocious publication.

"There was all this talk about the 80 pages I'd scribbled at college that had won me a huge advance, and the irony is that none of those 80 pages actually ended up in the novel. I suppose the main problem I had with the book, and it's to do with writing a long novel in your early 20s, is you may not have much in the way of actual life experience. All I had, really, was what you might call books experience. You read a lot of books, and that's probably all you can do to prepare."

She has been holed up in a remote writers' retreat in Scotland, finishing her second novel, The Autograph Man, which is due out next autumn.

"I didn't mean White Teeth to be this big, loose and baggy thing. I want to write shorter, leaner books, and that's what I'm trying to do now."

Amis said that writing Experience had been vastly different from working on a fiction. "It came much quicker than fiction comes, because I had the guidelines of real life instead of imagination. But it was almost more exhausting, because I had to go through it every day emotionally, and it changed my metabolism almost, in that I needed much more sleep than usual. I felt a type of deep fatigue that I had never felt writing a novel."

Inevitably, there was talk of fiction's shifting perspectives in the wake of September 11th. "Writers are just like everybody else and feel diminished by what happened on that day," said Amis. "It made a lot of people think about what they had done with their lives, and it didn't seem very much. There was a feeling that literary fiction was a frippery we would have to do without.

"But then this lifts, and you fight your way back to what you're writing, and you even feel mildly guilty for escaping from this generalised, unpleasant sort of bad-dream feeling that has descended on us all."

He has begun a new book and says he "fully intends to examine the change in the mental atmosphere. It will definitely be a post-September-11th novel".

One effect of the events in New York and Washington DC, he said, is that it makes clear how lightly language gets thrown around. "I just brought out a book of collected criticism called The War Against ClichΘ, but, you know, we can all live with a few clichΘs, really. At least I didn't call it The Crusade Against ClichΘ."

Smith said that writing suddenly seemed of secondary importance after the attacks. "The main thing we probably all feel, or should feel, is what Martin has called species fear, or species consciousness. When I finally went back to the computer, a week or so later, I just couldn't see the point of it. But eventually I thought, oh, screw it, I am going to write." (She has since announced that she may not continue with novels, preferring to aim at an academic career, at Harvard.)

Both writers were dismissive of the trend for historically set fiction. Neither has yet read True History Of The Kelly Gang, Peter Carey's Booker winner. Amis said he has never grasped the attraction of period pieces.

"I picked up a copy of a novel by Melvyn Bragg recently, and the first two words were something like "AD 637", and I went, oh God, and just sort of flung it across the room."

At an audience question-and-answer session to round off the discussion, we were treated to some random thoughts from the endlessly quotable Amis.

On non-novelists: "The thing about novelists is, we don't understand how the rest of you can stand not being novelists. Everything you experience must seem so pointless and wasted. How do you do it?"

On whether he might write a children's novel: "If I had six months where I was recovering from a serious head injury, I suppose I might consider it."

On the devotion of lesser lights: "I'm sure that even when Danielle Steele goes to her desk in the morning, she fully intends to give it everything she's got."

On whether he reads his own work: "There was a time, actually, when I felt there was no better way to pass an evening than five hours of me. But not any more."

And on stamina: "In the end, the most important page of any book is the one that's headed 'By the same author'."

Experience is published by Vintage, £7.99 in UK; White Teeth is published by Penguin, £6.99 in UK