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Alan Hollinghust was born in 1954. He is the author of six novels, including The Swimming-Pool Library and The Line of Beauty, which won the 2004 Man Booker Prize, and was filmed by BBC2. His latest novel, The Sparsholt Affair, was published in 2017. He lives in London.

The Sparsholt Affair

Sun, Mar 17, 14:00

The Shanghai Literary Festival is hugely honoured to host a return visit from legendary British novelist Alan Hollinghurst. Acclaimed as a faultless stylist and an acute observer of human interaction, Hollinghurst’s sixth novel The Sparsholt Affair is absolutely true to form. It explores a web of (forbidden) encounters and personal repercussions from 1940s wartime Oxford through to present day London. This is an exciting opportunity to explore with the author how The Sparsholt Affair sits within the body of extraordinary novels he has published to date The object acts almost as a protagonist in Hollinghurst’s novels, where the question of cultural cultivation is central.

This session is moderated by art dealer Simon Kirby, who works with some of the most interesting voices in contemporary visual art, including Yayoi Kusama, Isaac Julien, Grayson Perry and Sarah Sze. The session may also be a chance to discover how the material object, as well as poetry and music, inform the author’s personal experience of the world and his creative process.

Moderated by Simon Kirby