Daughter-in-law chides me mercilessly.

“Honoured father,” she says. “Why do you not wear the flannel shirt I sewed for you? Did I blunt my best needle so you wouldn’t wear it, heh?”

She betrays her lack of breeding through this casual ‘heh’, and I wonder if I chose a proper wife for my son.

“Your tender concern is a mark of true duty,” I reply. “But Daughter-in-law’s best needle rests against her teeth.”

SO, WITH this delicious exchange, begins York author Tim Murgatroyd’s first published novel, Taming Poison Dragons.

They are not real dragons: the title comes from a Chinese saying which means to grapple with your inner demons.

Throughout the course of this long and marvellous book, that is what central character Yun Cai does.

Taming Poison Dragons is set in Song Dynasty China in about 1200 AD. It is narrated by the elderly Lord Yun Cai, a famous poet exiled to live out his life on a remote estate in China’s western mountains after angering his emperor.

Much of the novel is related in flashback, following the young Yun Cai’s life as he sets off for the imperial capital Linan – modern-day Hangzhou – to study for the imperial examinations that are the only path to high office.

Hangzhou is a city of pagodas and pavilions set around the beautiful West Lake. But for the young Yun Cai – friendless, far from home and reliant on the generosity of relatives – it is a forbidding place.

Worst of all, the young poet finds that if he is to make a successful career for himself, he has to bow his head in deference to the ruling hierarchy.

Success in the examinations means suppressing all originality of thought, and producing rote answers based on the ancient Chinese classics. Even worse, once he has passed the exams and been placed on the ‘golden list’ of Chinese scholar-officials, he finds that he still needs a high-placed patron if he is to succeed.

For the young poet – passionate, hot tempered and impatient – the chafing collar of convention proves too uncomfortable.

His affair with a beautiful singing girl offends his betters, and he finds himself banished to the deserts of the far north west, and a bitter war against rebels.

With the benefit of a lifetime of hindsight, the old Yun Cai looks back with regret and a sense of loss on the mistakes of his youth. And then another rebellion threatens everything he holds dear.

It is a beautiful, stirring, thoughtful novel, steeped in poetry and demonstrating a profound insight into the thinking and behaviour of the Chinese of the time.

That opening exchange alone, with its use of the terms ‘honoured father’ and ‘daughter-in-law’ and the subtle reference to needles resting against teeth – the old gentleman’s way of telling his daughter-in-law she is too sharp-tongued – captures exquisitely the stifling conventions of the day and the way that, despite the formal language and constrained behaviour, human nature will out.

What makes this novel all the more remarkable is that Tim, a 42-year-old English teacher and father of two young boys, has never been to China.

How on earth did he manage to write this?

It has all come from the poetry he says, with a modest laugh. “I have always read a lot of poetry, and when I was a teenager I found this book of Chinese poems in a bookshop. It had an immediate affect on me, and I started collecting anything I could find.”

Over the years, he steeped himself in the poetry of classic Chinese authors such as Li Bai, Su Dongpo, Du Fu and Bai Juyi, poets who are masters at expressing, in a few brief, seemingly formal phrases, the deepest and most powerful feelings.

“They use imagery to express really subtle, complex feelings,” Tim says. “But there is this very strong personal voice that comes through. The poems often seem quite detached, but you can hear these really, really strong emotions in them, and I think that helped me imagine the voice of the character in Taming Poison Dragons.”

Tim has always loved literature. Born and brought up near Brighouse in West Yorkshire, he studied English at Oxford, then went to London, where he worked with homeless people for many years.

Eventually, he decided to go back to his first love, literature, and trained as an English teacher. He and his wife and two sons, aged eight and nine, now live in York. He has written novels before, as well as a volume of (very English) love poems, but this is his first published novel.

And where did he get the idea from?

“I was sitting down writing in my diary. I remember I had read this poem, and I just wrote a couple of thousand words in one night, which was Yun Cai’s voice. I had no clue where the story was going, all I had was this character.”

But from there, the story flowed.

He fleshed out the detail by reading extensively about Song Dynasty China, which has enabled him to recreate the minutiae of everyday life.

There are many parallels between Song China and the western world today, Tim says. Like ours, it was a materialistic, hedonistic culture – one that was apparently meritocratic, but in which a ruling, privileged elite held all the reins of power through a system of patronage. There were huge inequalities, and real exploitation and poverty – issues Tim touches on through the concerns of the idealistic Yun Cai.

But above all, this is a novel about people, Tim says: people he got to know and understand through poetry. And why not? “You could argue that, if you read a lot of poems, you are dealing with people who are expressing their deepest feelings. That kind of truth is universal.”

•Taming Poison Dragons is published by Myrmidon, priced £12.99. The publishers have entered it for the Booker Prize.