this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. we live in a culture defined by speed and transience, a cacophony of sound bites, viral videos and emojis. how many of us still read books? to be specific, is there still a public appetite for weighty novels weaving complex stories packed with nuance and detail? well, the success of my guest today says there is.

alan hollinghurst won the booker prize two decades ago for the line of beauty. his latest novel, our evenings, has had rave reviews. over four decades of writing, how has his imaginative landscape changed 7 alan hollinghurst, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. you've been at this novel—writing business for, as ijust said, four decades and more. with age and experience, does it get easier? it gets 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. but 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 what to leave out in writing a novel which covers perhaps 50 or 60 years. indeed, i get that cos, i mean, our evenings — the latest novel — does cover a long period of time from the sort of late �*60s through to the contemporary time. yeah. ijust wonder whether, as you sort of consider that span of time, whether you reflect on the way you've changed as well as the country you write about, which is britain? i do reflect on that, and i think particularly in this book, because it's written in the first person —

and the person is not me in various significant ways but also has quite a lot of me in him. so it sent me back, certainly, to memories of my teens and student days, and i think there is probably something more autobiographical about this book, even though it's about someone who isn't me. to put it bluntly, it takes you a long time to write these kind of epic stories. well, i've always been very slow, yes. is it painful? i absolutely love it when i've got two or three people in a room and they're talking, and... but the larger decisions, those questions of what goes in, how you structure the book, those sort of things ifind can be... not painful, but difficult and prolonged. and is it lonely? i mean, do you have to be quite isolated to do it in the way you want to do it? i tend to work best when i do isolate myself and set aside periods of time in which i'm not going to do anything else

or see anybody else. it isn't lonely because, you know, you have... it sounds a rather childish thing to say, but you have the company of your characters and the world, the world that you've gone into to play around, you know? i think because i take so long to write a book, i can feel a bit, sort of...miserable in the middle of it. it's thrilling starting and a huge relief finishing, but when you're a long way from either end, it can be a little bit worrying. let me take you back to your early 30s, when you sort of had your breakthrough novel, the swimming—pool library. and i guess that caused something of a literary sensation because you broke new ground. you were a gay writer who chose to, in essence, write a serious literary novel which was actually directly and graphically gay in its content. how carefully did you have to think about doing that before you did it? because it was ground—breaking.

yes, well, ithought about it quite a lot, and it was an exploration of things that i'd been thinking about in a kind of academic context, as well as a sort of social one and a personal one. i wrote it with that kind of light—heartedness that you can write a first novel when no—one knows anything about it. i wrote it when i got home from work and at weekends, and it wasjust a project i had with none of the anxieties which were attached to writing the subsequent books. i'm just thinking about the time and also your background. you've described in detail how you came from a sort of classically english middle—class background where a lot was left unspoken. so there you are in your early 30s and you're writing, as i said, a pretty graphic gay novel.

i mean, how did you feel about the family reading that? were you so out by then that that was not an issue? were you totally at peace and were your family at peace with all of that? no, i wasn't so out with my family then. i think i knew from the start that if i was going to worry about what my family thought, that i wouldn't be able to write this book, so i rather sort of hard—heartedly set that as my priority. and i knew that it... if the book was going to be interesting, it would be connecting up things which previously had been separated. it would bring into the picture the sexual dimension of a young gay man's life. it would talk about things which before you'd only been able to read about in sort of criminology or pornography. it would sort ofjoin up the different aspects of gay life experience, history, and to do all that, ijust had to be completely uninhibited, really. i think the lead character

in the book describes his life at the time — because it's set in the early �*80s in london — as a belle epoque. but by the time you were actually writing it and it was published, i'm very mindful that things had changed quite a lot. i mean, we knew by then about the dangers of hiv, aids — the gay community was being ravaged by it — and i just wonder whether there was an urgency to what you felt you had to say, to give voice to, in terms of the gay community at that point, which was all about that particular time. yes. it was an extraordinary thing to have happened at the large...the larger scale. it was an extraordinary thing to happen to me whilst i was writing that book, and i had to make a decision as to whether the book itself would reflect this catastrophic change which had occurred in the world i was writing about. and as you know, i decided not to and set it in 1983, so just before that change. the belle epoque just before... that was the belle epoque period between decriminalisation and the coming of aids. but by the time it came out in 1988, the whole landscape had changed. and i think i felt because

there were quite strong anti—gay feelings generated by aids and new anti—gay legislation brought in by the thatcher government and so on, i thought it was all the more important to be defiant and not cowed by this, and to write this sort of fairly... i mean, complex, but generally rather exuberant account of life as it had been before aids. was it a political act, writing it? i think it appeared to me to be so...afterwards, though i'm not sure how much i thought that at the time. probably the book did have a sort of political impact of a kind, which i hadn't really quite planned on. it's just interesting to me because in later work, there are political undercurrents. you don't ignore the contemporary times that your characters are living through, but you're not a deeply political writer.

you're not seeking to write that sort of defining state of the nation novel, and your politics is introduced with nuance and complexity, not with a polemic or a specific message. so i just wonder whether these days you feel political. i think this new book feels to me political, and it's sort of... it's framed by political issues such as, uh...the eu and our relation to it. brexit. and it starts in the early �*60s, when britain's making its first attempts tojoin the eu, and it ends just after the decision to leave. so that was a framing structure for the book, but i didn't, of course, think of it as a brexit novel. it's about the life of an artist, an actor, which in the end will be quite impacted by these larger political decisions. and it's partly about a school contemporary of his who veers away to the far right and becomes a sort of leading tory eurosceptic and someone very instrumental in the brexit decision. so there are these... yes, as you say, it's not

an explicitly political novel, but it has these political strands, ithink, quite... and something that, again, is a common theme in your work is that gay characters are central to most of the stories you tell — it would be true of line of beauty, it's true of our evenings — but unlike the swimming—pool library, in more recent work you've sort of moved away from the graphic sexuality, the direct, in—your—face sexuality. and i... you know, people have noticed that and i think some people are puzzled by it, and why is that? why are they puzzled, or why have i moved away? well, both. i think, yes, there have been some expressions of regret about that. they laugh but i think, as i was saying, i felt. it was sort of important and novel and urgent to do all that when i started a0 years ago, but it seemed to me

less and less so as i went on. did you get tired of maybe being pigeonholed as the gay novelist? i think i was always slightly wary of that. and when i came to write my second book, i was conscious of a certain pressure of expectation on me that i would perhaps write an aids novel, for instance, and ijust knew that i didn't want to do that. my books all come from some rather personal space that i can't quite define, but i didn't relish the idea of having a story sort of given to me, as it were, or a responsibility to represent a particular point of view or moment. and eventually i came round to writing about the aids crisis in the line of beauty, which came out in 200a. so, um... actually, i've noticed that there's actually more sexual ambiguity in your work now. there are characters whom you can't quite place. they... at times you think they're gay and then maybe they're not, and there's a sort

of ambiguousness about...sexuality in the work. yes. well, i became more interested, yes, in sort of exploring sexuality than defining it, perhaps. and, certainly, my novel the stranger�*s child, which is about a sort of bisexual first world war poet who was killed, that was a way of exploring those questions a bit more. i think those do come to interest me more, though. and actually, of course, things can be quite erotically charged without one describing them in specific physical detail. do you always feel when you write that you're writing as an outsider? i get the feeling that there's something profoundly "outsider" about the way you see society and the world. well, i think i tend, without quite planning it, to have protagonists or narrators who are kind of insider—outsider figures. they usually have an element of outsiderliness because of their sexuality... or their class... ..or their class.

..and the milieu they're in. i mean, ijust wonder whether you, alan hollinghurst, you know, because you write a lot about, you know, the british class system. i mean, not in a very crude way, but it's always there... yes. ..in the term, the "manners" — the sort of social etiquettes — and also just the placing of the stories in oxford university or in high society in grand houses. you yourself went to oxford. you came from a middle—class background. you, i'm sure, have mixed in high society and in those grand houses. when you do, do you, as yourself, fit in, or do you feel like an outsider? he chuckles i haven't really spent a lot of time in grand houses, you know, except as a paying member of the public. but... but you know what i'm getting at? yes. well, perhaps a novelist needs to have that sense of outsiderliness to clearly see the terms of life

that's going on in any particular community. and i like the idea that the outsider sort of enters a new terrain with their antennae sort of twitching for what's particular about it, whilst retaining a sense of the values of where they've come from. cos you've been likened — and i get it myself — you've been likened to sort of some of the great writers who write sort of deeply ironic comedies at times of manners and social situation. jane austen would — you know, going back — be one. and you could point, i guess, to henryjames or em forster. is that a tradition you like to feel a part of? i think it is, yes. i mean, i do think of myself broadly as writing in a tradition of english social comedy and that, you know, the books can veer wildly in tone and feeling and they can have very, very dark and difficult things in them. but there is probably something essentially comic when you get people together about the kind of social negotiations that people enter into with each

other, and about conversation itself and the things which are not being said in conversation. and that has always fascinated me, and i think is probably rather central to... and it digs deep into sort of english obsessions with things like class. but... it does, absolutely. ..one thing you've done in our evenings which is different — and you talked about it a little bit already — in creating the character of dave win who is central to the story, you've inhabited a character who's not quintessentially english. indeed, he's half burmese, and that is interesting cos these days in literature, there is a raging debate about, you know, sort of authenticity, cultural appropriation — the degree to which writers should adopt characters who are very far from their own experience. again, did you have to think hard before doing that?

idid. i mean, i had long wanted to do it. to do it — to try and imagine life from the point of view of someone with a different racial heritage from myself. and, of course, during the time i was actually planning and writing this book, all those matters became tremendously politicised, you know, and for very good reason. my sort of principled position has always been that an imaginative writer should be able to assume any perspective viewpoint that they want. but, of course, the...the possibility of error, of causing offence, which you could say is merely unwelcome and otiose, is considerable. and i think i landed on the idea of the biracial narrator as someone who would sort of, as it were, be half me — someone who had more or less lived through the time and world that i had lived in and who, like me, would turn out to be gay, but would have this further unignorable defence of his appearance, his skin colour. and, um, i thought this would be sort of a tactful way of doing it, and also because of the burmese thing,

which is quite an unusual mixed ethnicity in this country, it would have that rather particular interest of... it's not like writing from the point of view of a second generationjamaican immigrant or something. have you had feedback from people? i don't know whether burmese people or other people, writers from minority communities who have either said, "do you know what, alan? that didn't work," or, "how dare you," or, "greatjob." well, happily, yes. the latter, yes, which is a great, great relief to me. yeah. i mean, you know, one does one's research and everything, but a lot of it is, in the end, purely intuitive. um, and... what about writing women characters? how do you find that? i've loved writing the women characters that i have. i've never written in the first person from a female perspective, but i have, i think, increasingly had important central female characters in my novels, and in this one, indeed... i mean, there is this extraordinary and actually very moving relationship

between the central character dave's mother and the woman who becomes her lover in a lesbian relationship. and it... i mean, particularly the portrait of the relationship between dave and his mum, avril, it's very moving. imean, it's... again, a lot is unspoken, a lot is unsaid. does it reflect alan hollinghurst and the relationship you had with your mum? there is quite a lot of that, i think, yes. i mean, they are pretty well the same generation. i should say that my mother's sort of life story was very different from avril�*s in the novel and she didn't settle down in widowhood with another nice, rich lesbian divorcee. but... stephen laughs well, that's the imaginative

gift you've got, yeah. but, yes, that generation of women who came from a relatively modest background, lived through the war, found the war something which liberated them from what would otherwise have been a rather confining, um, trajectory, i think. my mother was the only daughter of a woman who was widowed even before my mother was born, and it was very much understood that she would sort of stay at home and look after her mother. so the war was, in a way, what set her free. so i think i was reflecting on those longer things about that generation, and being myself the only child of a mother who was a widow for 25 years, and the very strong, deepening bond between us over that time. my mother died a few years before i started writing the book, so in a way, i saw it as a sort of homage to her. let me now ask you about the extraordinary sort of changes you've been part of in terms of creativity and writing over the past a0 years and more. i mean, i dare say when you were a student... and you were actually a poet as a student — you wrote some very successful poems, i bet you bashed them out on a typewriter, or maybe by hand. but anyway, the point is, you certainly weren't using a computer at the time.

no. and here we are in the era of the smartphone, when everything is instant and electronic. i mean, do you think that has fundamentally changed the place of the novel in culture, this massive technological shift? surprisingly little is my feeling. i mean, i've lived through numerous announcements of the death of the novel, but i must say, i've always had a sort of unwavering belief in it, and the instinct to write it and to read it has always been extremely strong in me. i don't want to upset you, given that you've just resuscitated the novel, but there was a recent article in the atlantic magazine. it quoted a whole host of esteemed literature professors from the united states, saying that their students arrive in college simply

unprepared to read books, not really knowing how to read a book. daniel shaw, chair of georgetown�*s english department — "my students have trouble staying focused "even on a sonnet." and in this country, the national literacy trust saying that only 35% of 8— to 18—year—olds enjoy reading in their spare time doesn't suggest that the novel is going to have a very bright future. no. those are worrying statistics, obviously. but then i reflect that during the pandemic, there was an enormous boom in novel reading and novel sales. my publishers had the best year they'd ever had. and i persist in thinking that in a world of very short attention spans and the consumption of everything in tiny snippets, that the novel will retain a sort of counterbalancing allure. i take the point that education itself is different now, and that i understand that a—level students often don't read whole books — they read bits of them, or they watch the video or the film or something,

and that there is a huge change in how literature is absorbed, but i'm not giving up on it myself. the other threat may be artificial intelligence. can you imagine that one day a generative ai software programme could write a better novel than you can? it'll be such a relief, yes. they laugh yes. well, i don't think you really mean that, do you? no. yes, it's a chilling thought, obviously. there are some publishers who are doing deals with, you know, the tech companies to allow their books to be uploaded, to be used by generative ai. would you be prepared to let our evenings be uploaded? because if you were, then it's more likely that in the future, a computer could spurt out a novel in the style of alan hollinghurst. yeah, and i'm very much opposed to my work being used in that way, yes, precisely for that reason. have people approached you yet? no, actually, i haven't

been asked about it. i'm just... perhaps i should look into it. i don't know if you dabble. have you ever sort of gone onto your computer and thought, "i'lljust sort of give ai" — a chatgpt—style piece of software — "i'll give it a chance to write something "and see if i like it, because maybe i could use it." i haven't, no. i think i've been going for long enough to be so deeply attached to my own slow, deliberative method. i mean, it might be a fun game, i suppose, like a party game to see what it came up with and, i hope, deride the results, but... well, you're smiling through this conversation. i am smiling bravely through it. so what we began with is the fact that you do find writing difficult, more difficult as you get older, and yet you've just published a very successful new novel. are you prepared to go through the agony, the isolation, the pain again, and in your eighth decade get on with the next one? well, when i finished it, i thought, "never again," but already i'm feeling the lack of having

that other space to go into and mess around in. i think it's been such an important part of my life for a0 years, and i can't imagine living without it. so i am, yes. won't give up? i won't. alan hollinghurst, it's been a pleasure. thank you forjoining me on hardtalk. thank you very much for having me. hello there. the rest of this week is going to remain very cold, certainly very cold at night.

and we have further risk of snow and ice for northern and western areas primarily. but as we head into the weekend, something slightly less cold will begin to push in off the atlantic with temperatures recovering as we head into next week for some of us. now we've got some lower tier met office yellow warnings in force for snow and ice. northern and western scotland northern ireland, some significant accumulations of fresh snow over the highlands there and an ice warning. a yellow warning for ice for parts of north west england and north wales. also some freezing fog patches for northern ireland, northern england, north wales through the morning could be stubborn to clear, but a lot of sunshine away from the north coast of scotland. skies turning cloudier, though across the southern half of england and south wales, with some rain, maybe some hill sleet and snow getting into the higher ground of southern england later on. but a cold day wherever you are, two or three

degrees at best. so we could see some sleet and snow over the tops of the moors, south wales, the hills there and across the downs for a time as we head through wednesday evening, eventually it will start to pull away, take the cloud and the rain with it. clearer skies again as we head into early parts of thursday. so temperatures falling like a stone and further wintry showers, northern scotland and northern ireland, again, there will be a risk of ice. temperatures could be down into minus double digits again across parts of northern england into scotland where we have lying snow. so we hold on to that run of cold northerly winds, with further snow showers feeding into northern parts of scotland. we remain very much in that cold air mass, so thursday is another very cold day. lots of sunshine around, some ice to begin with. further wintry showers northern scotland, northern ireland, perhaps into northern western wales. northwest england few of these running into the midlands, again, ice could be a risk here, but for most it stays dry on thursday. cold and sunny, temperatures struggling to get much above two or three degrees. as we head through thursday night the wintry showers continue across northern areas.

temperatures fall away sharply, some mist and fog forming once again. a bit of cloud, some rainjust pushing into the very far southwest, which could be wintry and temperatures could be down to —15 celsius or even lower as we head into friday morning. we will see a change as we move through friday. slightly less cold air begins to move in for the weekend, certainly in the north and the west of the country.

live from washington, if this is bbc news. 30,000 people evacuated from the los angeles neighbourhood of pacific palisades has a wildfire continues to spread. donald trump holds out the prospect of extending us territory and floods the idea of military action for control of greenland and the panama canal. former presidentjimmy carter funeral procession lies at the capitol where he will lying—in—state until thursday. where he will lying—in—state untilthursday. —— where he will lying—in—state until thursday. —— arrives. we begin with breaking news from los angeles where a rapidly evolving wildfire has

taken hold near the city. we can show