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. Appearing at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre, he is joined in conversation by Michael Williams.

Amongst the topics discussed by Hollinghurst and Williams:

• What makes a good poem?
• The influence of Victorian poetry and boarding school
• The “huge prestige in writing poetry which nobody could understand”
• Being a “massive fan” of Lord of the Rings
• Beginning to feel like a writer
• Championing Ronald Firbank
• The Swimming Pool Library and its growth from earlier studies in writing
• Changing as a novelist and aspiring to formal shape
• Sympathising with, and liking, his characters and their predicaments
• Winning the Man Booker prize
• The centrality of poetry in The Stranger’s Child
• A short reading from the same
• Why skepticism is due to “almost all literary activities"
• Writing sex scenes
• Evelyn Waugh and sentimental nonsense
• The “ghettoisation” of literature
• Hollinghurst’s "complete fascination” with Henry James, and The Line of Beauty