He is now known as one of the world's most intellectual writers, but Salman Rushdie has revealed that he was inspired to become an author by the scandalous stories he heard from his “world-class gossip” of a mother.

Rushdie told the Edinburgh International Book Festival his desire to write was strongly influenced by the stories his parents told him as a child. His father, he said, narrated to him versions of classics, such as The Arabian Nights, and his mother updated him with the latest tittle-tattle.

"My mother had another gift: she was a world-class gossip,” he said. “She had in her head enormous architectures of misdeed, and like all really great gossips, she couldn't keep her mouth shut.

“So she would spill all the beans, and it got to a point where she said to me, ‘I'm going to stop telling you stuff, because you put it in your books and then I get into trouble'.”

When asked if he too was a gossip, he replied drolly: “No, I just put it in the books.”

In a sideways swipe at the fatwah placed on him after the publication of The Satanic Verses, he added: “I'm actually very good at keeping my mouth shut, probably because I have caused such enormous trouble in my life.”

Rushdie was at the festival to promote his latest book, The Enchantress of Florence. It is among the 13 novels on this year's Booker longlist, and is presently the favourite to win.

Rushdie has already been awarded a Booker for Midnight's Children, which was also named Booker of Bookers on the 25th anniversary of the prize and voted by the public last month as their favourite Booker winner.

Set in 16th century India and Italy, The Enchantress of Florence is a blend of fantasy and historical fact.

Rushdie, who spent seven years researching the novel, told of how much he had enjoyed writing it. “I had a really good time writing this, I have to say, because I think the reason I became a writer in the first place was in a way to restore storytelling to the centre of the literary fictional project. I felt that it had somehow fallen to one side.

“This time I felt I'd partly made up and partly stumbled on aspects of a really great story and all I had to do was not screw it up.”

After reading several extracts from the novel, he spoke at length about his childhood, and his early love of books.

“I can't remember this, but my parents used to tell me that I would say when their friends asked what I wanted to do when I grew up that I wanted to be a writer,” he said. “A 10 or an 11-year-old doesn't know what that means so I think if you say such a thing what you mean is that you would like to be a reader, and that you want to inhabit that role.”

He lamented that many perceive his books as autobiographical. “In the last couple of books I've gone to some trouble not to have ‘me' characters in the book - not to have characters where people can say, ‘Oh, that's the author in disguise', and the reason is that I feel people know too much about me already.”

He said that writing Fury, whose protagonist is an Indian expatriate academic living in New York, had “taught him a lesson” because there had been an assumption it was little more than a diary.

“It shocked me,” he said. “I thought, surely we know by now that writers sometimes use characters who are close to them to enter the world in a certain way.”

In a world first, yesterday's Rushdie session was broadcast live from Edinburgh via a satellite link to the Melbourne Writers' Festival.

The move was to celebrate Melbourne being named a Unesco City of Literature last week, the second city to win the title after Edinburgh in 2004.

Catherine Lockerbie, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, described it as an “historic occasion”. She said: “We welcome with open arms to what we hope will be a growing network of literary cities across the world.”

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