Wanted: a stern editor for authors who write too much

She must be single-handedly responsible for the destruction of a small chunk of the Amazon forest.

Why don't Heathrow protesters camp outside her gates and demand she reduce her literary output? Are her publishers too afraid to edit her? Dame Iris Murdoch was such a sacred cow towards the end of her novel-writing career that not a comma of her manuscripts would be altered by her publisher. As a result her books became ever more bloated and unwieldy. Yet she, like Carol Oates, could have benefited from severe pruning.

Georges Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century with more than 400 books to his name. The Belgian creator of Inspector Maigret could churn out a novel in 11 days. When advertisements appeared announcing that a fellow writer was publishing "his first novel for three years", Simenon responded AND with subversive flyers boasting "the first Simenon for eight days".

He also claimed to have had 10,000 lovers but that's another story. Simenon always hoped his psychological novels would earn him the Nobel Prize. Much to his chagrin it was his middle-brow Maigret detective novels that won him enduring acclaim.

Prolificacy is no guarantee of immortality. My grandfather SPB Mais wrote more than 200 books and was a household name. Sadly, he's now completely forgotten and he only lives on in second-hand bookshops.

When I go on my annual pilgrimage to Hay-on-Wye I always seek out his works. It is a curious form of ancestor worship akin to those Madagascans who disinter their relatives each year before burying them again. Like another prolific writer, Honoré de Balzac, who worked from midnight to dawn turning out a million words a year, SPB wrote to keep the bailiffs at bay.

There is an argument for writing fewer rather than more books. WG Sebald had only four books published in his lifetime and yet his posthumous reputation grows by the year. Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a novel. Imagine how his reputation might have plummeted if he had published a duff one.

Can you name the most prolific author in history? It is South African writer Mary Faulkner, who wrote 904 books under six different pen names with alluring titles such as Wind of Desire and There is No Yesterday. I bet you you'll forget her name in a hurry..