A waiter working in a London Restaurant, whose first novel has been shortlisted for the £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize, has told reporters that he has no plans to give up his day job, even if he wins. Ross Raisin, 27, who works at Smith's of Smithfield,

said: “Writing is pretty isolated, whereas at the restaurant there are always people around and it's much more fun.”

How interesting, that's exactly what Franz Kafka said when asked why he was staying on at Onkel Walter's Wurst Haus in Prague, where, long after the success of Die Verwandlung, he kept a Saturday job waiting tables and juggling dumplings at children's parties.

Indeed, throughout the history of Western literature the relationship between waiters and writers has been nothing if not symbiotic. Almost all writers have at one time been waiters, and almost all waiters end up as writers. You only have to change one letter, after all.

I myself was a writer, sorry, waiter for a couple of years in the early 1990s until I was rescued by The Times. I worked at the Dome (subsequently the Café Rouge) in Hampstead, and I have no doubt that when The Times has finished with me I will end up back there, serving cold cappuccinos and microwaved cassoulet that smells of wet dog as joylessly as ever I did in my youth. £2.50 an hour plus tips may not be a fortune but, as Mr Raisin will explain, you're not in it for the money, you're in it for the people.

From Chaucer to Orwell, waiters have been the very rock on which our literary heritage was built. The first truly great work in the vernacular, The Canterbury Tales, has a waiter as its central organising character. For it is the “host”, Harry Bailey, head waiter at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, who, the night before the pilgrims rode for Canterbury, “served us with vitaille at the beste;/Strong was the wyn, and wel to drynke us leste”. And then, when he had got them nicely fried, suggested that each man and woman tell a tale, and that the teller of the best one should “have a soper at oure aller cost / Heere in this place”.

In short, the first great stories of our modern English culture were told at the behest of a waiter. And their reward was to be served by him (to this day one still occasionally encounters a waiter whose slowness to provide service makes you wonder what you have to do to get his attention, tell a bloody story?). So without Harry the waiter, nothing.

And if you are going to be difficult, and say that the first great vernacular epic was not the Tales but Piers Plowman, I will say to you: Ha! Piers Plowman was the greatest waiter of them all, for he not only served, but actually invented the bread, cheese and pickled onion lunch.

Now, it is well known that Shakespeare worked in a gastropub in Shoreditch long after his first few plays had brought him fame and wealth, which is of course why he filled his work with waiters and serving men, from the flunkies who fill Sir Toby Belch's tankard to the hostess who shares the stage with Falstaff at the Boar's Head Tavern in Henry IV Parts One and Two and is given the grim task of reporting his death in Henry V.

And does not Hamlet seem as miserable as any waiter asked to pass off yesterday's uneaten dishes as today's “specials”, when he reflects on the distasteful practice of serving wedding guests “funeral-bak'd meats”?

Nor can one help feeling that Tamora, Queen of the Goths, did not leave much in the way of a tip for the waiter who served her that pie containing her dead sons in Titus Andronicus. To say nothing of the two lost plays: Much Ado About Stuffing and The Timing of the Stew.

Nor are these the only waiterly texts lost forever to posterity. Had Thomas Hardy only stayed a little longer in his job at a Wessex branch of Happy Eater, he might have completed his promising Waiter of Casterbridge. And if only George Eliot's publishers had not rejected her first novel, based on her experience flipping burgers in a riverside steakhouse, The Grill on the Floss. Not forgetting Charles Dickens's gripping indictment of the iniquitous practice of table-turning in posh restaurants, A Tale of Two Sittings.

George Orwell, of course, really did work in a restaurant in Paris. He was only a lowly plongeur, or washer-up, but what he saw was enough for him to end Down and out in Paris and London with the observation that: “I shall never again... enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant.”

Orwell was, of course, an immigrant worker, as most waiters in Britain seem to be today. Mainly Polish. Like Joseph Conrad. A case of, “Mistah Kurtz - he still waiting for his starter”.

Most of the time these days, though, waiters are only passing through, earning a few quid on some round-the-world tour. Only the other day this waiter comes over and says to me:

“Call me Ishmael. I'll be your waiter tonight. My mates call me Ish? I'm from New Zealand? Anyway, having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world? So I got on a boat with this craaaazy guy? And there was, like, this huge whale? Like, really, really massive? Anyway it, like, ate him? Or took him down to the bottom strapped to its side or something. And there was this coffin? Made by this really cool guy with tattoos? Who drowned? And I climbed on it and survived. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. And I thought maybe I'd write about it? Anyway, what can I get you? The fish is very popular.”

So I asked another waiter, a Jewish American fellow, “What's the catch of the day?”

He said, “There are 22. And whichever you choose it'll be the wrong one.”

So I left and went instead to one of these fashionable modern Japanese places with a scary security man on the door. It reminded me of that poem by Coleridge, you know the one: “It is an ancient Bouncer / And he stoppeth one of three. / By thy goatee beard / Which is stupid and weird / Wherefore stopp'st thou me?”

And he replied: “Because you're wearing trainers. This is a posh restaurant. We have a lot of Russians in. They do not pay three hundred quid a head to look at people in cheap shoes. Naff 'orf out of it.”

So I went home hungry to read in bed. I've just finished Gabriel García Márquez's riveting history of South American restaurants in the 20th century, A Hundred Years of Solid Food, and now I'm reading a newly published early draft of The Corrections - written when Jonathan Franzen was still working as a waiter. It's about a man who goes into a restaurant and orders

the chicken, then calls the waiter back and says, “No, hang on, scrap that, I'll have the veal. No, wait, on second thoughts I will have the chicken after all...”

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