Returning for its 16th year from 25-28 September, Marlborough LitFest is excited to announce the award-winning novelist, Alan Hollinghurst, as its 2025 Golding Speaker.
Hollinghurst received a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours list for services to literature. His seventh novel, Our Evenings, has been described as “the finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time” (The Guardian). Funny, tender and deeply moving, it gives us a portrait of modern England through the lens of an Anglo-Burmese man whose acutely observed and often unnerving experience tell a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence.
Marlborough LitFest hosts an annual Golding Speaker to highlight the town’s long connection with the Nobel Laureate and Booker Prize winner, William Golding, at an event sponsored by William Golding Limited. Past Golding Speakers include Linda Grant, Sebastian Barry, Ali Smith, Elif Shafak, Ben Okri, Rose Tremain, Will Self, Lionel Shriver, Louis de Bernieres, Fay Weldon and Howard Jacobson.
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of six previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. Hollinghurst will be appearing at Marlborough LitFest on Friday 26 September at Marlborough Town Hall.
William Golding’s daughter, Judy Carver, says, “We are so pleased to be associated with such a brilliant and ground-breaking novelist. A really exciting choice.”
Mary-Vere Parr, chair of LitFest, says: “I am a huge admirer of Alan Hollinghurst’s work and can’t wait to welcome him to LitFest. We are so fortunate to have the support of William Golding Ltd to bring such a wonderful novelist to Marlborough.”
This year’s festival will feature a varied programme of events for all ages including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and the annual Big Town Read. The festival aims to champion new, upcoming writers as well as established names and also encourage a love of reading in children and young people with author talks, competitions and our ongoing community outreach programme. Further confirmed authors and events will be released over the coming months.
The full LitFest programme will be available in the summer. For more information, visit www.marlboroughlitfest.org
Marlborough LitFest would like to thank William Golding Ltd for their support to this annual festival event.
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