What can I say? Secrets in fiction and biography

Booker Prize winning novelist Alan Hollinghurst discusses fiction and biography in conversation with Hermione Lee at Wolfson College's Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW).

Alan Hollinghurst gives an insight into the secrets of his fiction at Wolfson College's Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, speaking in conversation with College President and literary biographer Hermione Lee on the complex relationships between biographer and subject; lived experience and the attempt to record it, a subject he explores in his latest novel, The Stranger's Child. The conversation ranges over the changing attitudes to privacy charted through the historical span of the novel, the parallel liberation of biography and gay writing over the same period, the fallibility of the novelist's primary tool - memory - and the difficulty of acquiring a true understanding of the lives of others.