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 �*60

does it reflect alan hollinghurst and the relationship you had with your mum?e 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 bo

alan hollinghurst, welcome to hardtalk. thank you.ipated.