The ultimate prison, Incarceron not only imprisons its captives forever, but devours and recycles them. So vast that it contains not just cells and corridors but forests, cities and seas, it has been devised centuries ago as a place without hope – though a legend persists that one man managed to escape. Finn is a boy without memory, surviving Incarceron with thieves which trick and murder other Prisoners. Outside, beautiful Claudia is equally imprisoned in a society where everything is frozen in an idyllic version of the 17th century. Doomed to an arranged marriage, she and Finn each discover a mysterious crystal key. The two Prisoners – one on the Inside, one on the Outside – can use the keys to communicate, but can they escape?

A gripping and startling fantasy with undertones of current political problems, Incarceron marks a particularly fruitful development for an author who was short-listed for the Whitbread Children’s Prize in 2003. Fisher, a prize-winning poet born in 1957, has been writing fantasy since 1990, and ever since her Snow-Walker’s Son trilogy (1994-96) has been one to watch both for her remarkable imagination and a pared-down prose style reminiscent of both Ursula le Guin and Alan Garner.

“Oh, of course Alan Garner is a huge influence,” she agrees. “I love him because his writing is so intense, he packs in so much, and then there’s the way he uses landscape…”

Her own writing, too, is steeped in the landscape of her native Wales. The daughter of a book-loving painter and decorator, she read English at the University of Wales Caerleon branch (King Arthur’s seat), taught there, took part in a year-long archaeological dig in the town’s Roman ruins and still lives in the Wye Valley. Her strong visual sense amplifies her imagination (she has just done her first picture book, The Weather Dress with her sister Maggie Davies, a portrait painter,) and a particularly beautiful website. Incarceron itself germinated out of an exhibition at Cardiff of Piranesi’s imaginary prisons, “those vast shadowy chasms and viaducts, with tiny people, which I’m sure also influenced Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast.” Fisher’s sentient prison is an elaboration on many philosophical ideas concerning imprisonment, with a twist at the end that will lead to a sequel, Sapphique, next year.

A small, slight, very private woman with long, wavy hair she looks very much the seeress, and writes her novels to “find things out”, rather than planning the plot. Always one step ahead of readers’ expectations, she creates unforgettable characters such as the albino wizard Kari, the Snow-Walker’s Son, and the boy-god Alexos: children whose devastating gift of magic is matched by extreme vulnerability, needing support from a cast of fierce heroines, shrewd bards and semi-corrupt officials. As off-beat and demanding as Garner, or Robin Hobb, she is far from the sword-and-sorcery of cliché. Her dry sense of humour, reflected in her books, makes her engaging but there is a kind of remoteness to her, very much like Kari’s.

It has taken Fisher a surprisingly long time to break through to a more general readership. Her Oracle trilogy was optioned for film only after the Whitbread, an event which also caused her to be published at last in the US. She is plugged into the world of Welsh poetry but not that of children’s fiction, which she reads and enjoys (and in the case of authors such as NM Browne and Susan Price, clearly influences). Her imagination gets recharged by the Icelandic sagas and Welsh Triads; she loves “the fragments of story, the lists for bards to remember with the detail stripped out that you can do anything you like with.”

The Welsh bardic tradition, going back to Taliesin, is one she takes pride in, and sometimes, as in Corbenic (about a bitter modern boy deserting his mentally ill mother) she reworks Arthurian legend. To me, her most interesting work is, like the four-volume Book of the Crow and Incarceron, closer to SF, imagining a place where science and magic overlap. As le Guin advised in a famous essay on fantasy fiction, she thinks about the practical consequences of having two moons, or bad weather. You are made to feel the bitter cold through which Kari and his friends travel in The Snow Walker’s Son, and the parched deserts of The Oracle.

“All my places are real places,” she says. “There has to be a specific landscape, even if it’s called Narnia, for fantasy to have It – whatever It is.”

Like Tolkien and Robin Hobb, Fisher is a practising Catholic. She is wary of going into this too deeply, but says that “the sacramental idea that everything is charged” is as important to her as her feeling of “rootedness” in the Welsh landscape. Mireny, the sceptical young priestess in the Oracle who discovers that the God she serves really exists is a part of her rich ambiguity. Fisher explores both the limits and the beauties of solitude; in an unguarded moment, she describes how she was electrified to encounter Beowulf as a schoolgirl and “the absolutely basic thing of encountering a monster you have to fight with your bare hands and no weapons,” adding, “really, the threat is internal, not external. What fantasy is doing is taking everyone’s fears and making them bigger.”

Although Incarceron is the ultimate prison, Finn is one of a long line of Fisher heroes or heroines who must work through a spell of imprisonment before finding liberation through truth. For all her evident sensitivity, her nerves are much stronger than my own teenaged daughter’s, in fact, because when we go into the London Dungeon after the interview, we last precisely three minutes before running, terrified, for the exit. But then, if you’d read Incarceron beforehand, you might do the same.

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Catherine Fisher’s Incarceron is published by Hodder Children’s Books £5.99, on May 1st.