Alan Hollinghurst: The Sparsholt Affair

What this episode covers

Alan Hollinghurst discusses his sixth novel, The Sparsholt Affair, with author Dimitri Nasrallah. The Sparsholt Affair explores the changing attitudes towards homosexuality in England through the lives of two men: David Sparsholt, a teeneager briefly attending Oxford University during WW2, and his openly gay son, Johnny Sparsholt, who comes of age in London just as homosexuality is being decriminalized. Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the novels The Swimming-Pool Library; The Folding Star; The Spell; The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Stranger’s Child. He has also received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He lives in London. Dimitri Nasrallah is the author of three novels. He was born in Lebanon in 1977, during the civil war, and lived in Kuwait, Greece, and Dubai before moving to Canada in 1988. He’s won Quebec’s McAuslan First Book Prize, the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and was nominated for CBC’s Canada Reads and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and went on to become a critical and commercial success in French. A film adaptation is currently in pre-production. He is currently translating Éric Plamondon’s 1984 Trilogy from French to English. Alan Hollinghurst appeared in conversation with Dimitri Nasrallah on March 23, 2018 at Toronto Reference Library's Appel Salon.