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Prize-winning author, Alan Hollinghurst, visits Birkbeck

Novelist spoke about his writing and his Booker Prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty

On Wednesday 27 November, novelist Alan Hollinghurst spoke about his writing and his Booker Prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty, to an audience of Birkbeck students and alumni.

The event, organised in collaboration with the Booker Prize Foundation’s Universities Initiative, aims to make the highest quality contemporary literature available to students of all disciplines. 2000 copies of Hollinghurst’s novel were distributed to Birkbeck students during November.

In conversation with Birkbeck’s Professor of Creative Writing and former Booker Prize judge, Russell Celyn Jones, Hollinghurst revealed how his “Jamsian interest in points of view” had led him to move away from the first-person narrative of his earlier novels and to use The Line of Beauty’s main character, Nick Guest, to provide an outsider’s view of the life of the 1980s political elite. He explained that at the time of writing the novel (published in 2004), he wanted to seize new freedoms, not available when he began writing, and to write about gay sexual behaviour at a time when it had not been done in literary fiction. The discussion also covered what structure means in novels and how Hollinghurst’s personal experiences had influenced the novel.

Hollinghurst went on to answer varied questions from an enthusiastic audience, which covered his approach to conversation in the novel, the lack of hustle and bustle portrayed in the London-based novel and his joy at the diversity of reaction to his central character, Nick Guest.

This was the third consecutive year that Birkbeck has hosted a Booker Prize winner or shortlisted author, following visits from Kazuo Ishiguro in 2012 and Sarah Waters in 2011.

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