Alan Hollinghurst: Beautiful Lines and Strangers’ Children

Alan Hollinghurst is one of the British novel’s most admired stylists. In the course of his writing career, Hollinghurst has fashioned a unique literary voice at once considered, ruminative and hauntingly affective. Clever and provocative, Hollinghurst’s fiction tackles the most compelling existential questions – identity, sex, politics, history and aesthetics.

Alan Hollinghurst’s latest two novels have propelled him into the literary hall of fame. His Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, adapted into a major BBC series, satirised the excesses of Thatcherite London. His latest novel, The Stranger’s Child, traces the growing fame of an early-20th century poet across the generations, and in so doing dramatises the development of gay culture in Britain.

In conversation with Michael Williams.