Literary Birthday – 26 May – Alan Hollinghurst

Happy Birthday, Alan Hollinghurst, born on 26 May 1954.

Alan Hollinghurst Quotes

1. The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.
2. I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.
3. I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I’m glad of. It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.
4. I’m not at all easy to live with. I wish I could integrate writing into ordinary social life, but I don’t seem to be able to. I could when I started [writing]. I suppose I had more energy then. Now I have to isolate myself for long periods.

Source for quotes

Alan Hollinghurst’s Top Writing Tips

1. Know where you’re going before you start.
2. Don’t waste time but take your time.
3. Keep a notebook at all times.
4. Read. Read. Read.
5. Don’t be disheartened by early criticism.
6. If possible, have an inescapable writing routine.
7. Don’t over define your characters. Let the reader imagine them.

Tips From the Writers Write interview

Alan Hollinghurst is an award-winning English author, poet, short story writer, and translator. He studied English at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving a BA in 1975 and MLitt in 1979. He is known for his elegant, detailed literary fiction that explores class, sexuality, politics, memory, and desire in British society. He won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award and the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and he received the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. His novel, The Stranger’s Child, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. His latest books are The Sparsholt Affair and Our Evenings. Read his interview with The Booker Prizes.

by Amanda Patterson

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