Head of Performing Arts, Mark Chutter, interviews English novelist Alan Hollinghurst

Our Head of Performing Arts, Mark Chutter, interviewed the famous English novelist Alan Hollinghurst recently as part of the Dorchester Literary Festival. Hollinghurst is a novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He has won the Somerset Maughan Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst is credited with having helped gay-themed fiction to break into the literary mainstream through his six novels.

Mr Chutter interviewed Hollinghurst regarding his latest novel Our Evenings . This narrative is Dave Win's own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security; but it is also the story of his widowed mother, whose life takes a new turn after her son leaves.

Hollinghurst answered some bespoke questions about his work including his use of LGBT and diversity themes, his use of time and music alongside his literary influences. The audience were inspired and enthralled with the interview. Mark Chutter said, 'it was such a great honour to interview this groundbreaking author - I had read The Swimming- Pool Library and The Line of Beauty when they were first published - Hollinghurst really did bring gay literature to the forefront of modern contemporary fiction. Wey Valley looks forward to working in partnership with the Dorchester Literary Festival again in 2025'.