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Ivan Klima grew up knowing exactly what freedom was. Freedom was the opposite of his childhood. In 1941, when Klima was 10, his father was sent on the first Nazi transport to Terezin, the "fortress ghetto" north of Prague, and the family followed. Klima remained in Terezin for the duration of the war. He had, he says, not been aware that his parents were Jewish until Hitler came to power.

"Anyone who has been through a concentration camp as a child," he once wrote, "who has been completely dependent on an external power which can at any moment come in and beat or kill him and everyone around him - probably moves through life at least a bit differently from people who have been spared such an education. That life can be snapped like a piece of string - that was my daily lesson as a child."

There were other lessons, too, though; lessons in survival, lessons in escape. Klima had only one book with him in Terezin, The Pickwick Papers . He read it over and over, and transported himself daily to the world of Sam Weller and Nathaniel Winkle. Freedom was established in his mind as storytelling.

He started to write while in the camp, aware that any page he finished could be his last, and found that the trick of escape worked even better. He wrote plays and made his own puppets to perform in them, and then stories about the girls he fancied, daydreams about his first loves. The sense of liberation he found in these made-up sentences never left him. "I have always pursued inner freedom," Klima tells me now, at his home in Prague. "I have never been censored."

Those early experiences, what he calls his "younghood", are currently much on the writer's mind. In his adult life Klima has slept with a scarf over his face, a legacy of Terezin, where the lights were never turned off; part comfort blanket, part defence mechanism. He's always had a recurrent dream, he says, every few weeks throughout his life, that he has once again been captured, imprisoned. He has lately been reliving that sensation in his waking hours. Klima is 77 now, and working on a memoir tentatively titled My Crazy Century.

"For maybe 70% of my time I have not lived with freedom," Klima says, matter of factly, in words that hide years of sacrifice and struggle. After Terezin there was the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, the brief hope of the Prague Spring in 1968 - in which Klima was a key dissident voice - and then the 21 long years of dictatorship and repression before the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In all this time he never lost the idea of freedom, or the belief that it could be found in writing the truth.

Klima lives these days on the edge of a thick forest south of Prague. His two children and their families each have a house in the same road; most mornings in season he picks mushrooms among the trees. His friend Philip Roth once described him, with his "Beatle haircut" and "carnivorous teeth" as "a much more intellectually evolved Ringo Starr". The description just about fits still, though his hair has greyed; there is something resolutely bohemian about him, in every sense, a very stubborn singularity. He is quick to laugh, but he takes nothing quite lightly. His 30 or so books are written from the heart; honest, fearless, romantic, occasionally groping for philosophy.

I had met Klima once before, in 1991. Working for the publisher Granta, I had edited a couple of his books in translation; we went to a smart restaurant in west London. I had naively imagined that, post-1989, he would be in celebratory mood but he was instead wary of any simple conclusions, and intensely guarded against affectation. He insisted on eating only a plain bread roll and some vegetable soup, and studied me with some gruff amusement while I gabbled on about how it must feel to be free. In response he gestured bleakly toward the years his generation had lost.

At his home, all these years later, he is far warmer but no less sceptical. "For the young generation," he says, evenly, "1989 is very old history already. I sometimes go to discuss with students in Prague what happened and I often have to explain first what communism was; they have absolutely no idea."

For himself, he still has a powerful sense of before and after. "Looking back," he says, "it all seems inevitable now, but that is not how it felt at the time. There was perestroika in Russia; and in our country there was such collective hatred against the regime and the collaborators, who were the most third-rate people. So something had to change, but that it would go so quickly was a surprise."

Klima was in attendance in the Magic Lantern theatre as the Velvet Revolution was created by Vaclav Havel and his friends, mostly writers, in the extraordinary days of protest against the government in November of that year. At one point he was invited to address the audi ence from the stage. It was, he says, the first time he had been allowed to speak in public in his home city for 20 years. It was an intensely emotional moment.

"I said something simple about the situation and there was tremendous applause," Klima recalls. "The strange thing was that afterwards many people came up and said that they had not known I was living in Prague all these years. Blacklisted writers had been made non-existing persons by the regime. People thought we lived in exile; in a way we did."

That speech and the events that followed, which saw Klima's comrade Havel installed as president, and many of his friends, writers and academics, suddenly reinvented as ministers of state, represented that most unexpected thing in Klima's life: a happy ending. Encapsulated in the joy and surprise of that ending was all the defeated hope that had gone before.

If 1989 was the best of times, the worst of times, Klima says, was 1970. When the Russian tanks had rolled into Prague in August 1968, Klima was in London, en route to a teaching fellowship in Michigan. Shaken by the news, he carried on to the States with his family, and when the teaching stint came to an end a year later he was faced with the toughest decision of his life. Should he stay in exile in America, as many Czech dissidents did, or should he take his family home?

"Everyone said: don't go back, they will send you to Siberia," Klima recalls. "But I just felt there was no sense for me as a writer to stay abroad, missing not only the language but the connection with the people you best understand. I could admire Americans but their problems were not my problems."

Klima returned in March 1970 at the height of the Soviet-backed purges. "It was very frosty," Klima recalls. "They banned everyone who had been involved in the Prague spring; 400,000 people lost their jobs, nearly all highly skilled people, teachers, lecturers, everyone from radio, TV, trade unionists." Klima was blacklisted as a writer, and prevented from working except in menial jobs. He had his passport removed, his driving licence taken away, his phone cut off. He was threatened with prison if his books were published abroad and a law was passed which allowed the state to take foreign royalties deposited in bank accounts.

Klima began to fight back against these privations straightaway. "I organised a reading the week after we got back," he says. "I invited about 45 guests, which I'd worked out was the most I could get into our living room. And I prepared meatballs, 'Klima-balls' as they came to be known. There was some wine, and somebody read something that was newly written. That was how it went on, every week. I remember Havel read two of his new plays; Kundera, who was still in Prague at that point, came and read some things."

After about a year, Klima's friend Ludvik Vaculik (the author of A Cup of Cof fee with my Interrogator ) brought along a man from Ostrava to one of the gatherings, a writer who had spent a year in prison. The man, who later committed suicide, had signed an agreement in prison to work with the secret police and he passed on the names of everyone who was there, and pictures were taken of people coming in and out. "So from that point," Klima says, "we were known."

The writers were followed, and their houses searched. Meetings became more difficult but, Klima says: "We were determined to be in close contact." Someone suggested circulating typewritten pieces of writing, and books, as a way of continuing to spread ideas - samizdat ("self-published"). Novels or poems or plays were typed up - originally by Vaculik's girlfriend - copied, and circulated among the friends, to begin with in editions of 14 copies, later 50 or 60 and eventually, in an underground network of printing and binding and copying, several thousand.

As he explains all this, Klima goes to the bookshelves that line his living room and starts pulling down thin volumes, typed double-sided on air-mail paper. "This is one of Havel's plays, this is a volume of Jaroslav Seifert's poetry." A neatly bound history of dissent.

"In the end we managed about 300 titles in 18 years," he says. At first the police tried to confiscate individual samizdat copies during house searches but the words spread too quickly; they could not cope. It was a secret policeman's worst nightmare. "It was also," says Klima, "really what kept us going."

Klima was for many of those years, along with all the other purged intellectuals, working in various jobs - ambulance driver, surveyor, road sweeper - which became the starting point for much of his fiction. He also moonlighted as a smuggler: getting manuscripts out to western publishers through friends in embassies or visiting students and getting hard currency payment back in. In this way Klima's books, and the books of his friends, stayed in print in more than 20 countries, though not their own.

His fiction dwelled on his preoccupations, which were often about how to live a "normal" life in a repressive system. The most successful of his books, the semi-autobiographical Love and Garbage , dwelt on his time as a street sweeper when he was torn between his love for his wife and an affair with another woman.

"Living in truth", he suggests, was often easier for him politically than romantically - but then, at the time: "Love and infidelity and reconciliation seemed to affect almost everybody." The impoverished reality of lives seemed to exaggerate romantic fantasies.

"For myself, I always liked women," he says. "I fell sometimes in love, which was always a great thing. But I am too very happily married; just last year we celebrated 50 years together. 50% of people of my generation are divorced. In my opinion to divorce is to choose to enter again into the same situation, but with more pain all around."

Klima has sometimes written about the events of 1989 in the breathless tones of a love affair, notably in his book Waiting for the Darkness, Waiting for the Light . The central character, Pavel, a television director who has seen his career ruined by the communist regime, gets caught up in the frenzy of the November revolution.

"The air was acrid with the smell of tired human bodies..." Pavel observes. "And that strange, almost exultant mood that seemed to bring everyone, including him, closer together. This feeling of solidarity had surprised him. He wasn't prepared for it..."

In the crowd Pavel meets a woman he once loved and she kisses him spontaneously. Some time later Pavel tries to remind the woman of the closeness they felt on the night of revolution.

"It was the moment that did it, Pavel, the time," she explains in the light of day.
"Is that time over now?"
"A time like that can't last for very long."

How long did the euphoria of those November nights in 1989 last for Klima himself, I wonder.

He smiles. "How long did I enjoy the feeling? It is interesting that a man very quickly accepts freedom as a normal thing," he says. "Though we had fought for it for so long, after a few weeks or months we did not think about it. Rather you start to see things you would like to change, things that make you angry, corruption and so forth, environmental problems, the obsession with the market, which is another form of unfreedom, so the feeling does not last long. But the changes, democracy, that does last."

Klima was offered official posts in Havel's government but he refused them all. "For me," he says, "the only sense for my activity was to do all I could to remove that horrible system; when it happened that was enough. And all I wanted to do then was to get back to my writing, now with the possibility of publishing."

In the weeks after 1989, Klima's books were rushed into print in Prague. Love and Garbage sold 100,000 copies, his stories, My Merry Mornings , sold 150,000 copies; there were queues in all the bookshops around Wenceslas Square. Now his books sell around 4,000 copies each.

"This is normal," he says, of the change. "The difference is now if I want to say something I can go to radio or to a newspaper and say it and no one is listening, they are all too engaged in the latest talent show. Back then all I had was a typewriter, but everyone was desperate to read what I wrote."
Klima has lived too long and seen too much to have any bitterness about that - it is just the way things are.

"We never expected to enter paradise that November," he says, just before I leave. "But we did have freedom."

Reality Czech: Key Klima facts

Born 14 September 1931, Prague
Family Married Helena, a psychotherapist, in 1958. Two children, Michal, a newspaper editor, and Hana, an artist
Key books My Merry Mornings (1985), Love and Garbage (1986), Judge on Trial (1991), My Golden Trades (1992), Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1994), No Saints or Angels (2001)
He says "There are some differences between a dictatorship which is strong and one which is tired. By the late Eighties ours was a tired dictatorship. They were no longer killing people and they made every effort not to arrest people. In this condition of a dictatorship you could find your own freedom. You could not become rich, you could not travel except maybe to Hungary, but you could write."
They say "During the early Seventies, when I began to make a trip to Prague each spring, Ivan Klima was my principal reality instructor. He took me around to the street-corner kiosks where writers sold cigarettes, to the public buildings where they mopped the floors, to the construction sites where they were laying bricks, and out of the city to the municipal waterworks where they slogged about in overalls and boots, a wrench in one pocket and a book in the other...." Philip Roth