Alan Hollinghurst is the author of six internationally acclaimed novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child and most recently, The Sparsholt Affair. All of Alan’s novels deal with aspects of British gay life and history, and he has been a key voice in the British LGBTQ literature canon since 1988.

Winner of the EM Forster Award, a 1989 Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, he was chosen as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993 and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1994.

The Line of Beauty won the 2004 Man Booker Prize and was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, America’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the author was nominated for the British Book Awards’ Author of the Year Prize. The novel was also adapted for BBC2 by Andrew Davies.

Alan will be interviewed by Simon Richardson.

Simon Richardson has been on the board of New Writing South for more than six years, but his day job is as a radio producer specialising in programmes about books. At the BBC he's made a range of programmes and series about LGBT writers including Edmund White, Kate Davies, Garth Greenwell, Juno Dawson, Stella Duffy and Neel Mukherjee. He's currently the Producer of Radio 4's Flagship arts programme Front Row where he takes a keen interest in exploring writing from queer perspectives.

This event is produced in association with Queer in Brighton History Club