Lauded as one of the greatest writers of our time (The Guardian), admired as an English stylist without obvious living equal (The Sunday Times) and recently knighted for services to literature, Sir Alan Hollinghurst arrives in Marlborough trailing clouds of glory. Winner of the Booker Prize in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, he was longlisted for The Strangers Child in 2011 and won the Somerset Maugham and the Stonewall Book Awards for The Swimming-Pool Library in 1989, plus the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Folding Star in 1994. Principally known as a novelist, Hollinghurst is also a poet, short-story writer, editor and translator. His seventh novel, Our Evenings, is a book of quiet power and emotional weight. It tells the story of Dave Win, an Anglo-Burmese actor, over six decades from 1962 to 2020, exploring questions of race, class, sexuality and origins. An instant bestseller, the reviews were ecstatic. Luxuriously immersive, subtle and elegiac [Our Evenings] traces the arc of a life to paint a picture of modern Britain and is shot through with love, longing and delicious comedy, declared The Bookseller. But perhaps the most telling praise came from novelist Emma Donaghue: I never wanted it to end.