Alan Hollinghurst

Booker-Prize-winning novelist Alan Hollinghurst talks about his first novel since 2017, Our Evenings, an exploration of race, class, equality and origins.

The story unfolds over half a century and follows the lives of Dave Win, sponsored for a place at a boarding school by the Hadlow family, and the Hadlows’ son, Giles, his contemporary at school. Their careers diverge dramatically as Dave goes on to become a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination and Giles pursues a career as a powerful and dangerous politician. The novel is narrated through Dave’s eyes and offers a portrait of modern Britain.

Hollinghurst is author of six previous novels including The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Booker Prize, The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair. He is also a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and is known for helping gay-themed fiction to break into the literary mainstream.