Beyond the sea: Sir Alan Hollinghurst bound for Brisbane
Acclaimed British novelist Alan Hollinghurst is disappointed to hear that Brisbane is not by the sea but he’s coming anyway for a special Brisbane Writers Festival event in May.
You don’t want to disappoint a man who happens to rank as one of Britain’s finest novelists when he tells you that he’s looking forward to visiting Brisbane.
Sir Alan Hollinghurst, author of such seminal works as The Swimming Pool Library and the Booker Prize-winning classic The Line of Beauty is heading to the Queensland capital, care of Brisbane Writers Festival, for an extraordinary evening on May 20, featuring two literary titans – Hollinghurst at 6pm in conversation with Carody Culver and at 8pm the same night the Scottish crime writer and creator of Inspector Rebus, Ian Rankin, in conversation with Ron Serdiuk – both at The Old Museum in Bowen Hills.
What a double. I know Rankin has been here before because I once hosted an event with him at Brisbane City Hall and he walked on stage behind me – to great applause – before I could finish my introduction. Oh, well.
When I chat to Hollinghurst one evening (an appropriate time since his latest book is called Our Evenings), he admits he has never visited Brisbane. He’s in Hampstead and I’m in Brisbane and he notes how strange it is being half a planet away as we begin.
“I’m really looking forward to my visit,” he tells me.
“How do you imagine Brisbane?” I ask.
“I have an unformed picture, really,” he says. “But I imagine the ocean and sunshine.”
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I explain that we can probably help him out with the sunshine at that time of year but that we are not near the sea.
“We are on a river,” I say. “A muddy river.”
“Oh dear,” he replies, a tad surprised. “I am an art lover. Do you have a good gallery?”
Boy, do we have a good gallery, I tell him, before giving him the rundown on QAGOMA. He will definitely visit there. Living in Hampstead he is not far from the late Barry Humphries place and says he recently attended an auction of art from the Humphries’ estate. “I nearly bid on a little Nolan,” he says.
The arts are important to Hollinghurst and, increasingly, it’s painting he’s interested in. But literature, of course, is a major interest. He has had a lifelong love affair with theatre, too. The protagonist of Our Evenings, Dave Win, at one point goes on the road with an experimental theatre company in his expansive novel.
It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence
“I set out to write something about 280 pages long and it ends up around 500 pages,” Hollinghurst says.
Well, actually, 487 pages in this one. But for many readers too much Hollinghurst is still not enough. He writes so beautifully. As long as his latest novel is, you tend to get through it at a reasonable clip. His style is engaging, even beguiling, and his character portrayals are brilliant. He says he wants the reader to have some fun along the way rather than have to struggle through. Bless him.
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Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
Our Evenings is a dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence from one of the finest writers of our age.
Dave Win is 13 when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence.
As their lives unfold over the next half a century the two boys careers will diverge dramatically. Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination (he is Anglo-Burmese); Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician. The book is Dave Win’s own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs in London and as a jobbing actor, and a late-life affair which transforms his 60s.
BWF programs and development manager Myles McGuire is a huge fan and says Hollinghurst has an innate ability “to capture time at its most ephemeral phase”.
“I adored this book, and its hero, Dave Win, who might be the most loveable of Hollinghurst’s protagonists,” McGuire says. “It is as gentle a novel as The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty are ferocious, and all the more powerful for its delicacy.”
It’s not strictly autobiographical but Hollinghurst points out that he is gay. A queer tint is expected in his novels, with this latest being his seventh. His portrayal of gay characters has made him a breakthrough writer in that sense, but he had a new challenge with his latest book, writing about a person of colour. He was worried about how that would be perceived and received.
“I’m very happy to say it has been well received,” Hollinghusrt says. “Even in the US, where these sensitivities are more pronounced.”
Australian readers and fans will be thrilled to hear from him in person and he is appearing at the Sydney Writers Festival after his event in Brisbane.
“I first came to Australia for Adelaide Writers Week in 1994,” he recalls. “I had a wonderful experience of flying in a small plane with Penelope Lively, David Lodge and Donna Tartt to Kangaroo Island. I have been to Sydney and Melbourne and Perth for my last book.”
Now, he will be heading for Brisbane .
“I’ll be in Auckland first,” he says.
I feel I should mention that he will probably get ocean views coming in for landing, but we’re out of time.
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, Picador, $34.99. Alan Hollinghurst Our Evenings, May 20, 6pm; and Ian Rankin Midnight and Blue, May 20, 8pm, both at The Old Museum, Bowen Hills.
bwf.org.au/2025/out-of-season-events-2025/alan-hollinghurst-our-evenings