Beautiful lines

ALAN HOLLINGHURST arrives in Hong Kong this week hoping to make the most of the 'long, fallow period' he grants himself after the completion of each novel. Normally described as a self-contained, resolutely private writer, the Englishman confesses to fleeing the office of his flat in Hampstead, London, and living it up until the ideas for the next novel take hold.

The next period of confinement seems a long way off, even by the standards of a writer who has devoted himself to only four novels in 20 years.

'I do have a feeling this fallow period is going to be even longer than usual,' he says, cautiously choosing the words he delivers in an educated and deep yet reserved English accent. 'I don't have much sense at all, really, of what the next book will be. I normally get some inkling of the next one as I'm finishing a novel.'

Any anxiety about the disruption to his process is eased by the recognition he received last year as winner of the Man Booker Prize, for The Line of Beauty (Picador), and the #50,000 (HK$750,000) that came with it.

Edmund White may have described Hollinghurst's debut, The Swimming Pool Library, published in 1988, as 'surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English author', and Hollinghurst has made the Booker short-list once before, for The Folding Star, but the 50-year-old has been a fulltime writer for less than nine years. He's more than happy to start thinking about the expensive tastes lovingly described in The Line of Beauty.

It's Hollinghurst's first day back in London after a holiday in the South of France. He has bought a car since the Booker and allowed the new fame to take him to the US, Australia and now to Shanghai and Hong Kong as the biggest name at this year's International Literary Festival, which starts today. The real prize in winning the Booker is the time it buys, says Hollinghurst.