Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is widely

regarded as one of England's very best writers of contemporary literary fiction. Alan Hollinghurst

won the prestigious Booker Prize two decades ago for his novel, Line of Beauty. Before that,

his breakthrough novel, The Swimming Pool Library, caused a sensation by focusing

its gaze on gay characters living life to the full in 80s London. It was, as one critic put it,

a dazzling landmark in queer literature. Homosexuality and its place in wider society is a theme which recurs in

Hollinghurst's half-dozen novels. His elegantly crafted, ironic prose has prompted comparisons with

Henry James, Evelyn War, Jane Austen. His stories are quintessentially English. Oxford University

looms large. Manners and matters of class and race are

subtly picked apart. And in this latest novel, the impact of Brexit offers a political undercurrent,

just as Thatcherism did in the line of beauty. Hollinghurst novels are complex and they're nuanced,

and they are long. They run against the

grain of a digital culture defined by instant internet access, viral videos and emoji-filled

communication. So what does his continued success tell us about the culture we live in? Well, Alan

Hollinghurst joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you. You've been at this novel writing business for, as I just said, four decades and more.

With age and experience, does it get easier? It's much harder for me, I think partly because of

a reluctance to repeat myself, partly because of something

I hadn't quite anticipated. I think I thought when I was younger that one might run out of

ideas. In fact, as I get older, and perhaps because I am a writer who tends to write books

which cover large time spans, I find that there's more and more material to write about. In fact,

it's deciding on what to write about, selecting the material, and at the same time deciding

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