Alan Hollinghurst: Delight in Dissent

Lancaster Litfest and Lancaster Arts are truly delighted to welcome Alan Hollinghurst, winner of the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty and the 2025 David Cohen Prize, to join a very special 'in conversation' event with Andrew Barker.

Since he burst onto the literary scene with The Swimming Pool Library in 1988, Alan Hollinghurst has challenged, entertained and excited readers with deeply felt, satirical and dissenting evocations of life in England at the intersection of class, sexuality and social change.  Now, in his latest novel Our Evenings, Hollinghurst chronicles England from the 1960s to the pandemic through the eyes of gay Anglo-Burmese actor, Dave Win.

Alan will be joined by Andrew Barker, Library Director at Lancaster University who we last saw in the event with legendary record and film producer, Joe Boyd, and whose interest in Hollinghurst's work goes back to the late 1980s.  On influences, Hollinghurst says 'From Tolkien I took an enduring, nearly mystical sense of landscape, and from Wodehouse a model of social comedy which would be deepened later on by reading Austen and Henry James and Waugh', Interview for the Booker Prizes, June 2024.