Acclaimed novelist and Walter Scott Prize nominee Alan Hollinghurst has confirmed he is joining us at this year’s Scott Prize award ceremony. Alan will be appearing at the historical fiction event as part of our illustrious panel which includes fellow nominees Andrew Miller and Sebastian Barry.
Alan Hollinghursts first book in seven years, A Strangers Child, is an epic story of two families and two houses spanning the entire 20th century, the book begins in the late summer of 1913, when the young poet Cecil Valance comes to ‘Two Acres’, the Sawle family home to visit his good friend from Cambridge, George and his sister Daphne. The weekend will become a pivotal point in their lives and the reverberations will last forever.
Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the ensuing century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance.
Throughout this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her, Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. Spanning almost the whole of the twentieth century and written in five sections of gloriously contrasting mood, setting and texture, the whole is a symphonic novel of incredible power, thrilling and profoundly moving. This is a truly great novel from one of the finest writers in the English language, at the height of his powers.
About the Author
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of five novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty and Walter Scott Prize shortlisted novel, The Strangers Child. He is a prolific award winner, having won the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and the Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.
As one of the contenders for the Walter Scott Prize, Alan will atteneding the Award ceremony on Saturday 16th June at 1.30pm- Buy tickets
Alan will also be on the panel of our Historical Fiction event on Saturday 16th June at 3.00pm - Buy Tickets
