Recently I was at a film event where I was introduced to a big producer by a very nice actor. The actor said, “this is Patrick, he has a debut novel coming out soon.”

The producer looked me up and down and said, “You took your time.”

Her comic timing – unlike my literary timing – was excellent. I laugh when I think of it still. She was the kind of person who prized herself on “telling it like it is”. And this is the “is” like which she told it: I am 51 years old. I have lived half a century. I genuinely forget this unless I pass a reflective surface, but I am grizzled. I do not feel grizzled. Nobody feels grizzled. As the humane and brilliant Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”

Why is my first novel coming so late? For some of my fellow late starters there is a gendered aspect. My favourite late novelists are all women – Louise Kennedy, Tessa Hadley, Toni Morrison. Often, women have care responsibilities and patriarchal presumptions to cope with before they can get anywhere. My own reasons for my late arrival as a married man without kids are probably less noble. I was in bands in my 20s and that’s where the creative energy went. There is a lost half novel, left in a flat somewhere in north Dublin, but that’s probably best left lost. It was about a man in his 20s who got drunk a lot and ranted about “corporations”.

My experience with music was interesting, though. There’s an industry that makes a man feel old. I have never felt older than I felt in my late 20s playing indie music. As my 20s progressed, I really did feel like I had a “best before” label on my forehead and that my time was running out. It was genuinely newsworthy in the world of indie rock when someone had a breakthrough record over the age of 30. “Jarvis Cocker is 31!” we all said when Pulp broke through with His ’n’ Hers.

Consequently, my band were already feeling over the hill when I was 26. When we took on an energetic 22-year-old guitarist, we asked our female friends, “Does Jeremy make us look younger?”

“We think he makes you look older,” they said, sadly.

Around this time I pursued a master’s in music and took a course in composition where the composer/teacher Donnacha Dennehy said, “The great thing about classical music is that you’re still considered a young composer well into your 40s.”

I took that a little bit too much to heart. I considered the notion that there were definitely fields in which youth has different parameters and filed it away for later. In my 30s, I spent a lot of energy that might otherwise have gone into writing a book into writing freelance articles. I had a living to make and needed to salvage some sort of career from the rocktacular wreckage of my 20s.

It took until my 40s before I started experimenting again with extracurricular writing. I wrote a film script with my brother. I wrote short stories that appeared in some of Ireland’s excellent literary journals. My first book, a collection of essays called OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea, was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Emerging Writers prize because the organisers had kindly chosen the word “emerging” instead of the word “young” for their award. This was a classy move. However, I still internalised the notion that “emerging” more or less meant “young”. I was only a spritely 45 then and because of my self-image issues I was, and still am, vaguely surprised I wasn’t being heralded as a literary wunderkind – the next Sally Rooney.

I am, it has to be said, probably the first hip young gunslinger of Irish literature to travel with a sleep apnoea machine. Is it not possible I’m just making sleep apnoea machines cool like my fellow young people did with mullets and moustaches? Also: mullets and moustaches are easy. Reclaim the combover and bifocal lenses, you cowards.

Even if it’s not as pronounced as in music, there’s still a cult of youth in literature. Everyone is constantly looking for the next big thing, ideally a youthful voice of a generation. In my more petulant moments, I wonder why I can’t be celebrated as the voice my generation. I’ll admit that Generation X already has more than enough voices representing them – Douglas Coupland and Kurt Cobain and Elizabeth Wurtzel and Kathleen Hanna and Johnny Knoxville and David Eggers, all of whom had the good grace to become that generational voice in their actual 20s, but what have they done for us lately? We need spokesfolk for the current moment, people with sore knees and regret!

Unsurprisingly I love stories of artists breaking through later in life. Louise Kennedy, author of the incredible Trespasses and now Stations, was a chef who had never even considered writing until a friend brought her to a writing workshop at the age of 45. It turns out she’s a genius. Tessa Hadley’s brilliant first novel Accidents in the Home was published when she was 46 but she has said herself that that’s nothing on Penelope Fitzgerald, whose first novel was published aged 61.

It is tempting at this point to say that because I am also an older debutant, I am as good as Kennedy, Hadley and Fitzgerald, but the truth is a late start is no more an indicator of quality than a precocious one. I do think being older to the job brings some advantages. I’m pretty confident about what I like nowadays and I’m pretty positively inclined toward my general worldview (“Surely this character’s politics are a little simplistic. We don’t want him to seem like an idiot,” said my well meaning editor at one point. “But those are my politics,” I replied.)

Thematically, my book also deals with issues that might be consistent with middle age. It’s ostensibly about a bunch of Gen-X musicians climbing over the hill, coping with their forgotten promise, their grief, their failures, their waning creativity, guilt, betrayal and death. You know, classic young person stuff.

But it goes wider than that – it’s a multivoiced novel from the perspective of a number of characters across the city – financiers, homeless addicts, care workers, priests, children, foxes, God. It encompasses a lot of things I have learned about Dublin and the people who live there as both a resident and an on-the-street journalist. It is, I hope, a sad, funny, weird book about community and creativity and ageing. I think if I’d written it in my 20s I would have channelled the story through the perspective of a more solipsistic first person narrator and not a kaleidoscopic chorus – though I can still channel things through a solipsistic first person narrator when I want to (just look at this essay).

There are other pros to being a debut novelist at 51. I sometimes see writers my age fret about whether their new work is overshadowed by their early literary promise. I have no such worries. I will not be overshadowed by my youthful offerings, unless a novel can be overshadowed by some ramshackle indie albums. I am also pretty sure that nobody is pretending to like my work because of my fresh-faced good looks. Though full disclosure: I hesitated typing that. Even as I sit here now, near no reflective surfaces of any sort, I simply can’t believe that that is true.

As the 2026 winner of the Stella prize, Lee Lai has established two new firsts: the first ever non-binary winner with her book Cannon, which is the first graphic novel to win the $60,000 Australian literary award for women and non-binary writers.

Cannon follows the titular, queer Chinese woman living in Montreal on the “uncool side of [her] twenties”. Cannon’s real name is Lucy, which became Luce then (loose) Cannon – and much like her unwanted nickname, she shoulders responsibility without complaint. During the day she cares for her gung-gung (maternal grandfather), a former tyrant enfeebled by age, without any help from her emotionally avoidant mother; and by night she works in the kitchen of a fine-dining restaurant, corralling chaos into order. Cannon’s longtime best friend Trish uses her as a soundboard for all of her problems, and is secretly mining Cannon’s life as a troubling source of inspiration for her writing career.

Speaking to Guardian Australia before her win was announced at a ceremony in Brisbane on Wednesday night, Lai says, “It’s been a challenge to keep it secret, especially with many wonderfully nosy friends.”

The Stella prize was first opened to non-binary writers in 2021. Lai, who was born in Melbourne and is now based in Montreal, was first nominated for the Stella in 2023 for her debut Stone Fruit, which won the Lambda Literary award for LGBTQ comics, the Cartoonist Studio prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel prize and two Ignatz awards.

Being the first graphic novelist to win the Stella is “pretty cool”, she says, adding: “I hope that this is a win for the comics community as well, and that it makes some readers more interested in reading comics.”

As for the impact of $60,000 on her life? “Ultimately, money is time. None of us have a lot of that. This money will let me go for a very long time.”

Generally, she says, the graphic novelist community “doesn’t have a lot of money. We joke that we are endlessly doing fundraisers and passing around the same $20 bill. In my world, this is a lot.”

The Stella judges have praised Cannon as “a bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry, the profound toll it takes to be the ‘responsible one’, and what can happen when you are being taken advantage of repeatedly. (Bonus: it is also, somehow, very funny.)

“Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, shock and delight, and Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot. And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.”

Lai began writing Cannon in 2019, working on it on and off for years while “paying the bills with the comics-related or illustration gigs I could take”. She found herself rewriting it as her world changed. “At the start, it was very fun to have an objective of taking a long-term friendship and grinding it down,” Lai says. “Then the pandemic happened and we couldn’t see our friends and everyone’s friendships were feeling a lot more fragile and it was no longer fun to do that. So I ended up writing a lot more optimistic outcome for Cannon and Trish than I originally planned.”

Cannon is a story about failures of communication and an exercise in showing, not telling: from a quick glance, Lai’s positioning of speech bubbles tells the reader if a character is being interrupted or ignored, if they are pensive or frustrated. It is mostly monochrome, with impactful pops of colour, and the pages are almost entirely four grid.

It is a restrictive way to work, which Lai enjoys. “If you create expectation [in the reader], when you break it, it’s impactful. You can control the reader’s pacing – you can tell them when to halt, when to pause, when to speed up. I’m manipulating a reader to get lost in the story a bit and then, with a single page turn, I screech the brakes.”

Cannon, who is stoic to a fault, is “some really extreme exaggerations of some of the ways I am”, Lai says. Cannon’s best friend Trish, meanwhile, is the embodiment of Lai’s “anxieties and cynicisms about neoliberal diversity discourse in the cultural sector”; Trish is writing a novel heavily based on Cannon’s life without her knowledge, but frets more about whether she is a “fucking cliche” for writing a gay-immigrant novel that will likely be attractive to white funding boards than the ethics of swiping her friend’s story.

“These are the sort of things that you think about [as a writer],” Lai says. “I wanted the reader to feel as uncomfortable as I do around those questions.”

Lai cites graphic novelists Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Craig Thompson (Blankets), Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth), Chester Brown (Louis Riel) and cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki (Skim) as influences whose work had helped to make “graphic novels be recognised as a legitimate form of literature”.

“Like everybody, my understanding of comics was once superheroes and Peanuts,” she says. “And then I read Skim and Ghost World and saw that, actually, something else is possible here.”

The term graphic novel is sometimes disputed by those who dismiss it as a pretentious marketing term to make comics more palatable to adult readers. Asked for her opinion, Lai laughs: “There is an irreverence around the term ‘comic’ that I like and there is something snooty about ‘graphic novel’ that I try to stay away from. There’s a distancing from comics’ heritage – I’m like, ‘Our heritage is Peanuts! Accept it.’”

British novelist Gwendoline Riley is among eight writers set to receive $175,000 (£130,000) each in recognition of their life’s work.

Australian playwright S Shakthidharan, known as Shakthi, is also among those selected for this year’s Windham-Campbell prizes, which award $1.4m annually to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, with the aim of enabling them to focus on their work free from financial pressures.

Riley is celebrated for her oeuvre of short novels that explore fractured relationships, family tensions and the interior lives of women, including First Love, which was shortlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction, and My Phantoms. “This is very hard for me to take in,” Riley said. “I am more grateful than I can say. This unimagined vote of confidence will not go wasted on me.”

“Riley’s work recasts our relationship with the familiar, transforming ordinary, unremarkable lives of her characters into something startling and new,” wrote Clare Clark in a review of Riley’s latest novel, The Palm House. “She is the laureate of disconnection, her bone-dry humour edged with the vertiginous lurch of despair.”

Shakthidharan was selected in recognition of works including his 2019 multigenerational epic Counting and Cracking, which is inspired by the story of his family and traces the history of 20th-century Sri Lanka. It won a swathe of prestigious awards in Australia, including the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature.

In the fiction category, Riley is joined by American writer Adam Ehrlich Sachs, who is awarded the prize for what the judges called his “bravura exploration of the history of knowledge in all of its absurdity, strangeness and difficult beauty”. Sachs is the author of three books: Gretel and the Great War, The Organs of Sense, and Inherited Disorders.

Belgian-born American writer Lucy Sante is awarded in the nonfiction category – her 2024 memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, follows her process of coming out and transitioning late in life. Jamaican poet, fiction writer and essayist Kei Miller is also awarded for his nonfiction work, including the 2021 essay collection Things I Have Withheld.

In poetry, American poet Joyelle McSweeney is recognised for work that engages with nature, trauma and resilience. Canadian poet Karen Solie also receives the poetry prize for a body of work that explores desire, loss and environmental damage.

Alongside Shakthidharan, American playwright Christina Anderson is awarded in the drama category for her work, which the judges said “mines intersections of intimate and political histories to breathe new life into the social drama”.

The “financial security” that comes with the grant allows writers “the time, space and creative freedom to think, write and nurture their talent” said Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham-Campbell prizes, adding that the arts are “facing more challenges now than ever before”.

Past recipients of the award include Olivia Laing, Anne Enright, Tessa Hadley, Edmund de Waal, Hanif Abdurraqib, Percival Everett, Teju Cole and Pankaj Mishra.

‘May I say that I’m very glad to meet you,”  Woody Brown taps on his word board. Brown is formal, funny and strikingly eloquent. He has a formidable ability to tell stories that reach into the mind of his characters and express what they are thinking, and what they think others are thinking about them. Brown is also autistic and non-speaking.

His first novel, Upward Bound, tells the story of everyday life at the eponymous adult day care centre in southern California. The title is ironic – the young adults, referred to as clients, are anything but upward bound. By and large, they are stifled, patronised, unheard and unseen. Despite their shortcomings, the staff are portrayed with a surprising tenderness.

The story is told from multiple perspectives – Walter, loosely based on Brown, is only understood by his mother; Hollywood-handsome Tom desperately tries to show the neurotypical world that he understands, by blinking; student Ann, who is doing voluntary work to boost her CV, fancies Tom but is blind to the charms of the other clients; Dave, the care centre’s director, really wanted to be an actor, and treats Upward Bound’s annual show like a Broadway production. Brown has created a wonderful portrait of the lives of people destined to be misunderstood by virtually all of us because, as he says, their brain and body are not on speaking terms (pun intended).

Brown, 28, is at home with his mother, Mary, in Los Angeles when we chat. Mary holds up the letter board on which he taps out his answers. She then speaks them back to me. Brown is not totally without speech. Sometimes, he comes out with a word or phrase, often delivered in a high pitch and repeated. This is known as echolalia.

Brown and his mother are incredibly close. She hugs him tight as a blanket when he is stressed, waits patiently for his answers and seems to understand him almost as well as he does himself. “She has been at my side for every moment of my journey,” Brown taps. “Without her there is no me.”

Nobody really knows what makes Brown and other non-speaking autistic people the way they are. But what his family knows for sure is that as a young child he was written off by specialists. His parents were told that he was a lost cause; that there was nothing going on inside. They sensed otherwise. When he was a toddler Mary watched Soma Mukhopadhyay, whose son Tito is autistic and non-speaking, on the TV show 60 Minutes. Mukhopadhyay had taught Tito to type, and now he could communicate with the world. She thought it would be amazing if Woody could learn a fraction of what Tito had. Mary took him to see Mukhopadhyay, who wrote letters on slips of paper and jumbled them up. “I’ve been told he’s mentally retarded, and she says ‘Woody spell cat’. And he pulls down the C and the A and the T. He’s three at that point!”

But it made little difference. When he went to school, teachers dismissed him as a no-hoper, and thought it wasn’t even worth trying to educate him. He was put in the lowest class and left to his own devices. At the age of eight, Mary tells me, the kids in his class were asked if they knew another word for sad. “When it gets to his turn he spells out ‘melancholy’ and he spells it correctly.”

And still it made no difference. The more Brown was misunderstood, the worse his behaviour became. He was bored, angry and disruptive. He threw chairs in class. “I was in the pit of despair,” Brown taps. How did he climb out? “It was a gradual ascent, starting when I was 12 and finally allowed to join the remedial class for lessons,” he taps.

You weren’t even in the remedial class? “I was meant to be in the lowest special ed class, which was so demoralising. At least in the remedial room they tried to teach some basic academics.”

“Sorry boss! Sorry boss!” he shouts in a high-pitched cartoon voice. It’s a shock when you first hear Brown speak.

Is he happy now? “I am very happy now that I have real purpose and productivity. I want this for all autistic people. One of the reasons I wanted to be a great writer was that I wanted neurotypical people to read my book, not out of pity but because it was a good book. That way I can reach the hordes who underestimate and infantilise us, and show them how vivid and magnificent we are.”

Brown is wearing a lovely T-shirt, featuring Japanese trains. I ask him what it means. “I love trains and Murakami. Hence Japanese trains. Murakami’s my favourite author. I’ve read so many of his books. We read every day, and I can’t get enough!” Mary reads aloud to him because he has visuospatial issues that make it difficult to focus on the words on the page.

You have a similar simple, limpid style to Murakami, I say. He smiles. “He’s also not very social like me!” he taps.

Mary asks him a question: “Woody, when you refer to the pit of despair what does that metaphor of the pit mean to you?”

“Murakami always talks about a well, which stands in his books as a metaphor for depression and loneliness,” he taps. “There’s a well in every Murakami book. I think of Murakami’s wells as a visual manifestation of my isolation.”

As he taps, I notice he’s looking away from me. At first I assume he doesn’t like to make eye contact. But then I realise sometimes he looks straight at me, and that he seems to be engaged in an activity when he looks away. I ask what he’s doing.

“May I say I think better when I have my screens going?” Brown says.

Now it’s Mary’s turn to smile. “Should we show Simon?” she asks.

“Yes!!!” he bellows.

There are three computer screens on a mobile cart, and he’s playing or watching each one as we chat – one shows his favourite cartoon, Thomas the Tank Engine, on the second he plays Angry Birds and on the third there are videos of old-school steam locomotives.

I ask him if he’s occupying himself with all the screens because he finds me boring. “No,” he taps. “May I say I have many screens running through my brain at all times. My brain is so busy that I have to occupy more than one channel at a time. If I only looked at you the top of my head might blow right off! It’s exhausting to narrow my vista to one window.”

We have agreed to do the interview in 30-minute bursts because any longer is exhausting for Brown.

“Hey mom, sorry you just don’t understand. You just don’t understand,” he says in the high-pitched voice.

“Do you want a break?” she asks. “Yes,” he says in a deep voice that I assume would be his natural tone.

See you later, I say.

Brown is already walking away with his cart of screens.

“Byyyyyyee. Goodbye Molly,” he says, reverting to the cartoon voice. Mary explains that Molly is a character in Toy Story 3.

---

Half an hour later we reconvene. Brown is newly energised. I ask in what way Upward Bound’s Walter is like him. “Walter is my alter ego. We share aspects of disability and personality.” In what way? “Many aspects of non-speaking autism are shared, particularly the frustration of being misunderstood by most people. I wanted to show how Walter was perceived by the other characters to get a glimpse of how inaccurately others see him. Only his mom is able to translate his verbal nonsense and Walter is lucky to have that one small corner of understanding.”

At one point Walter’s mother invites fellow autistic parent friends over to the house to watch a film about Temple Grandin. Walter hovers in the background watching the film. The portrayal of the autistic animal science professor infuriates him because “this lovely, lithe actress” [Claire Danes] plays her, whereas in real life Grandin is “big and awkward and ugly, in the way that Eleanor Roosevelt was ugly, magnificently ugly”. Walter has an autistic meltdown and puts his hand through a window. “May I say the Temple Grandin chapter is autobiographical.” He shows me his scar.

Your mum seems more fun than Walter’s mum, I say. “She used to be more stressed out,” he taps. “Her behaviour improved as mine did.” Mary is laughing. “Also we have both been working on our anxiety which helps us be nice.” Is anxiety at the core of people with autism? “Anxiety is a constant companion, but I can manage it better now. Meditation has helped greatly.”

Upward Bound’s Tom, for all his beauty, is understood by nobody. “I remember a boy like Tom from childhood, and I have always been concerned about him,” Brown taps. “I worry that no one ever heard him, and that he languishes somewhere alone.” Does he think many autistic people languish unheard? “Oh yes! People put their own ideas on to a blank page that they can’t otherwise read,” he taps.

“Us! Us!” he shouts.

When was the last time you saw him? “Maybe when I was 10.” Was he also Hollywood handsome? “Oh yes! He was gorgeous!”

The person least capable of understanding the clients at Upward Bound is Dave, the director. “Dave is a symbol of well-intended but ultimately self-centred carers who find their way into the land of disability by accident.” Did he have any carers like Dave? “Oh yes!” he taps. “Their voices are louder than the true believers.” What does he mean? “People who get it tend to be more quiet and introspective. They listen more than they need to be heard.”

One person who does get it is Carlos, a carer with a troubled background. “I love Carlos. He is the hero of the story,” he taps.

“Us!” he shouts.

“We’re starting to lose him,” Mary says. We agree to continue tomorrow at 10am.

“I’ve got more to say, but I’m all done now,” Brown taps.

“Wowowoowo! Goodbye James, see you tomorrow,” he says. James is a locomotive in Thomas the Tank Engine.

---

The next day they are five minutes late, and Brown seems a little stressed about it.

“In trouble,” he says repeatedly.

You’re not in trouble with me, I say.

“Sorry boss, sorry boss!” he shouts in the high-pitched cartoon voice.

Mary gives him a deep hug, which settles him.

In 2022, Brown became the first non-speaking autistic graduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he received the English department’s top writing honours. He completed his master’s at Columbia University in 2024. Mary attended both courses alongside him. He also took his cart and three screens to his studies. Multitasking was the only way he could focus on lectures and seminars. In his bedroom at home, he has far more screens all going at the same time.

Mary is also an English graduate, and worked for 20 years as a story analyst in the film industry with the likes of Steven Spielberg. Brown’s father Drew is head of production at Paramount TV. Mary anticipates there will be sceptics who suggest that she has helped Brown with his work, but she says she has had nothing to do with the creative process. Sure, she translates Brown’s sentences off the letterboard and then types them up, but apart from checking whether a comma or full stop is needed, and occasionally reminding him he’s used the same word twice in a paragraph, she insists she had no influence over the book.

When you’re with the two of them, this soon becomes apparent. Mary is super smart and good with words. But Brown is super-super smart and brilliant with words. Sometimes she will ask him to explain something because she can’t find the right language. Take trains, for example. Not only is Brown obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine in a childlike way, he also explains the workings of his mind via trains with a concept that could be the basis of a metaphysics PhD. “My mind feels like there are thousands of train lines all running at once, and there are trains on all of them. But they’re not on flat ground, they’re all in 3D. In the universe above me there are all these trains on their tracks just floating around and I’m on all the trains all the time.”

Why do so many autistic people love trains? “Parallel lines and soothing progress,” he taps. But, of course, when there are infinite trains floating in the universe and he’s on every one it’s not so soothing. The trailer to a documentary that has been made about Brown plays out against a horrible shunting and whistling of the railway station from hell.

Is that what you always hear in your head? “My head is so loud that it’s like Grand Central at rush hour. When alone in my room I turn everything, all my screens, to top volume. I drive my parents nuts with the noise. Cacophony is the only word to describe it.” Does that give you relative peace? “Strangely, yes. Mom loves quiet, I love chaos.” Does he really love the chaos or does it enable him to find a relative serenity? “Chaos outside neutralises the chaos inside,” he taps.

You are one complicated dude Woody Brown, I say.

“Sir Topham Hatt!” he shouts in a high pitch.

I ask Brown about the various romances in Upward Bound – all of them unrequited. Walter loves Emma, who is also autistic and non-speaking. He believes, or hopes, he can hear her return his love in her thrumming. “Emma is a real person. My friend since childhood,” he taps. “And I do feel love for her. I know we communicate via autistic energy fields. Our senses are disordered which makes us less attuned to some input and hyper-attuned to others. My childish wish is to find someone who will make a life with me in spite of my shortcomings.”

Why is that childish? “Fabulistic may be a better word. It’s hard for people who are so dependent to have a relationship in real life.”

Could you see yourself living away from your parents? “Yes. They are old, and I will probably survive them. My sister Annie and her husband, Matt, want to share their lives with me when Mom and Dad can’t take care of me any more. They like me. Go figure!”

Well, there’s lots to like about you, I say.

“Locomotives!” he shouts.

Mary talks to me about Brown’s echolalia. She says for so long she thought the words were random. Eventually, she discovered they were a form of shorthand. “Should I tell Simon the story of straight?” she asks him. He nods. “Woody used to watch videos with a blue dog. He still does. I can’t say the name because it stresses him. He’d have a meltdown and he’d say ‘straight’ all the time. How old were you when this was happening?”

“About six,” Woody taps.

“Then I watched him watching the video and the character in the video was trying to hang up a picture, and it was crooked, and he couldn’t get it straight and he was just so frustrated, and when I realised ‘straight’ meant frustration I was like ‘Oh my gosh’. I’d been dismissing these words as nonsense.”

“I use phrases that I can access with my mouth to compensate for all the words my mouth can’t say,” Brown taps.

Autism is currently being demonised by some on the political right in the United States. Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr have referred to the condition as a “disease” and said there is an “epidemic”. How does he feel about that? “May I say that they both distress me terribly. Their words and actions are dangerous.”

In Upward Bound, the carer Ann talks about the clients who can speak but do so constantly and repetitively, concluding that speech is not their superpower, it’s their kryptonite. I ask Brown if he regards his inability to talk as a superpower or kryptonite. Neither, he taps. “My disorder is just that. A disability that says nothing about who I really am. Some people have more strikes against them than others, but we all have things to overcome. Is being non-speaking worse than a child’s fate in Gaza or an immigrant’s destiny on the streets of Minneapolis? How dare I complain from my comfortable home? Perspective is everything.”

Brown is now working on his second novel, Alfie. “It’s a bildungsroman about my search for camaraderie,” he taps. Mary apologises, and says she’s not sure how to pronounce bildungsroman.

“Alfie is a boy in Arkansas who excels at baseball,” Brown taps. Is he autistic? “No, although he hides his anxiety behind his catcher’s mask.”

We’ve been chatting for an hour today. As I say my farewells, I tell Brown how much I love the title Upward Bound. He smiles. “Irony is my middle name,” he taps.

Well Woody Irony Brown, it’s been great talking to you, I say.

“Thank you,” he says. “Byeeeee! Say goodbye Molly.”

Len Deighton, the British author whose subversive spy novels helped redefine the genre in the 1960s, has died aged 97.

Best known for his debut, The Ipcress File, Deighton went on to write more than 30 books over a career spanning four decades, establishing himself as one of the most distinctive voices in postwar fiction. His work, often compared to that of John le Carré, combined meticulous research with wit and sharp observations about class and bureaucracy.

Published in 1962, The Ipcress File was an immediate success, selling millions of copies worldwide. It introduced readers to an unnamed sardonic working-class intelligence officer who stood in stark contrast to the glamorous archetype embodied by Ian Fleming’s James Bond (Dr No, the first in the Bond film series, was released in the same year).

The novel’s success led to a film adaptation in 1965, starring Michael Caine in what would become a defining role. Caine reprised the character – now named Harry Palmer – in subsequent films. Decades later, the story was revisited in a 2022 television adaptation starring Peaky Blinders’ Joe Cole.

The author was born Leonard Cyril Deighton in Marylebone, London, in 1929. His father was a chauffeur and mechanic, and his mother was a hotel cook. As a child growing up in wartime London, Deighton saw his neighbour, the pro-Nazi spy Anna Wolkoff, arrested – a real-life drama that may have inspired the kinds of plots he would later construct in his novels.

Deighton’s education was disrupted by the second world war, during which he was moved to an emergency school. After leaving school, he worked as a railway clerk before national service with the Royal Air Force. After his demobilisation, he used a grant to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art and later the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1955.

Before turning to fiction, Deighton pursued a varied career. He worked as a flight attendant for British Overseas Airways Corporation and later as an illustrator in London and New York, producing advertising and designing more than 200 book covers. Among these was the first UK edition of On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

His interest in food also became a significant strand of his career. He had worked as a sous chef at the Royal Festival Hall, and later developed what became known as the “cookstrip” – a cartoon-style guide to cooking. These were published in a series for the Observer, helping to popularise Mediterranean cuisine in Britain, and anthologised in two books, Action Cook Book (1965) and Où Est Le Garlic? (1965).

Deighton started writing The Ipcress File while on an extended stay in the Dordogne region of France in 1960. Its success launched a prolific writing career that included numerous bestselling novels, many featuring recurring characters and interlinked storylines.

Deighton’s fiction often drew praise for its complex narrative structure. When he first submitted The Ipcress File to Jonathan Cape, the publisher of Ian Fleming, he was encouraged to simplify it; instead, he took the manuscript to Hodder & Stoughton.

His work also stood apart in the genre for its realism. In contrast to the exoticism associated with much earlier spy fiction, his novels emphasised bureaucracy, institutional rivalries and the moral ambiguities of intelligence work. He also included footnotes on the arcane details of spycraft. “Deighton reinvented the spy thriller, bringing in a new air of authenticity and playing with its form,” wrote Jeremy Duns in the Guardian in 2009.

Deighton became increasingly private towards the end of his career. He was married twice, first to the illustrator Shirley Thompson and later to Ysabelle de Ranitz, with whom he had two sons.

António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese novelist whose dark, polyphonic fiction confronted the traumas of dictatorship, war and Portuguese society, has died aged 83.

Widely regarded as one of the most important Portuguese writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, he produced more than 30 novels that reshaped Portuguese writing and made him a perennial contender for the Nobel prize for literature. He received numerous honours, including the Camões prize, the most prestigious award in the Portuguese language, and several major European literary prizes. His death was confirmed by the publisher Dom Quixote.

Born in Lisbon in 1942 into a middle-class family, Lobo Antunes was the son of a neurologist and initially followed his father into medicine. He trained as a psychiatrist and worked in hospitals for several years, experiences that would later inform the psychological intensity of his writing.

In the early 1970s he was drafted and sent to Angola to serve as an army doctor during Portugal’s brutal colonial war. The experience marked him profoundly. “There I learned that I wasn’t the centre of the world and that others existed,” he later told a journalist. The war’s moral disorientation and emotional wreckage would haunt much of his fiction. In 1973 Lobo Antunes returned to Lisbon, where he practised psychiatry and wrote in the evenings.

His first two novels, Elephant’s Memory and South of Nowhere, both published in 1979, drew on his experiences as a young doctor navigating the political and personal upheavals of post-revolutionary Portugal, and brought him instant acclaim.

It was his ambitious 1983 novel Fado Alexandrino that confirmed his status as a major literary voice. Structured as a long night of conversation between veterans and a captain during the colonial war, the 700-page book captured a generation’s disillusionment with the war and established many of the stylistic hallmarks that would define his work: fragmented narration, shifting perspectives and meandering, rhythmic sentences.

Over the following decades, Lobo Antunes developed a body of work that critics frequently compared to William Faulkner for its density and musical complexity. Novels such as The Inquisitors’ Manual (1996) and The Splendour of Portugal (1997) explored the lingering shadows of colonialism, the hypocrisies of the Portuguese elite and the dysfunction of family life.

His books often resist straightforward plot, instead unfolding through overlapping interior monologues in which multiple voices circle the same events from different angles. For some readers and critics, the style could be off-putting; for admirers it was precisely this difficulty that allowed Lobo Antunes to capture the fractured nature of memory and the persistence of historical trauma.

Though widely acclaimed internationally and translated into many languages, Lobo Antunes remained relatively little known in the English-speaking world.

In 1970 he married Maria José Xavier da Fonseca e Costa, with whom he had two daughters, Maria José Lobo Antunes and Joana Lobo Antunes. The couple later divorced. He subsequently married Maria João Espírito Santo Bustorff Silva, and they had a daughter, Maria Isabel Bustorff Lobo Antunes. After their divorce, he married Cristina Ferreira de Almeida in 2010.

He is survived by his wife, his three daughters and his three brothers, Miguel, Nuno and Manuel.

Every November, leading figures of French literature gather in the upstairs room of an old-fashioned Paris restaurant and decide on the best novel of the year. The ceremony is staid, traditional, down to the restaurant’s menu, full of classic dishes such as vol-au-vents and foie gras on toast. In pictures of the judging ceremony, the judges wear dark suits; each has four glasses of wine at hand.

The winner of the Goncourt, as the prize is called, is likely to enter the pantheon of world literature, joining a lineage of writers that includes Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. The prize is also a financial boon for authors. As the biggest award in French literature, the Goncourt means a prime spot in storefronts, foreign rights, prestige. By one estimate, winning the Goncourt means nearly €1m of sales in the weeks that follow.

In November 2024, the Académie Goncourt gave the prize to a novel by Kamel Daoud, a celebrated Algerian writer living in France. His victory came at a tense moment for France and its former colony. The relationship, never an easy one, had been strained by the Algerian state’s increasing political repression of its people and French involvement in the dispute between Algeria and Morocco over Western Sahara. (France has sided with Morocco, which claims sovereignty over the territory; Algeria has supported independence movements there.)

Daoud’s own career has been shaped by this troubled relationship. Though he has long been a literary star in both countries, he moved to France in 2023, claiming he could neither “write nor breathe” in Algeria. Daoud’s French publisher, Gallimard, one of France’s largest, was prevented from participating in the 2024 book fair in Algiers. No explanation was given but many suspected it was because Gallimard had published Daoud’s latest novel, Houris.

Houris took on a subject that had long been controversial: Algeria’s civil war or “black decade”, a conflict between the government and armed Islamist groups over the course of the 1990s. Estimates of the number of dead vary; some go as high as 200,000. Massacres of civilians occurred across the country, many of them later claimed by Islamist groups.

The period remains delicate to discuss. In 1999, a law was introduced that provided legal clemency to Islamist fighters who put down their weapons. In 2005, Algeria passed a reconciliation law that widened the amnesty. But unlike some such laws, which require some form of justice to be served to the perpetrators, this law “allows for official forgetting, without any reflection on the actions of either side”, as one historian told me. “The executioners just went home.”

The reconciliation law is very broadly worded, making it illegal “to use or exploit the wounds of the national tragedy to undermine the institutions of the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, weaken the state, damage the reputation of all its officials who have served it with dignity, or tarnish Algeria’s image internationally”. The black decade is still not taught in Algerian schools. In interviews for the novel, Daoud dwelled on the law’s wide reach. The civil war, he said, is “a taboo subject that you can’t even think about”.

Houris, which was not published in Algeria, tells the story of the war through a 26-year-old woman, Fajr or Aube (Dawn), who, as a child, survived a massacre at Had Chekala, a village where a real massacre took place in January 1998. In the novel, terrorists killed Aube’s family and cut her throat with a knife. The attack gave her a large scar across her neck: her “smile”, as she calls it. To breathe, Aube has undergone a tracheostomy, a procedure through which the neck is opened to access the windpipe. She wears a cannula, which she sometimes hides with a scarf. “I always choose a rare and expensive fabric,” she says. But the injuries from the attack mean that, two decades on, her voice is barely audible. For her, the scar is a sign of a history that many want to forget. “I am the true trace, the most solid of signs of everything we lived through for 10 years in Algeria,” she says.

As the book opens in 2018, Aube finds herself pregnant with a girl whom she calls her houri, the name of a virgin of paradise in the Muslim tradition. As she contemplates an abortion, she returns to the site of the massacre. The novel takes the form of an interior monologue between Aube and her unborn child. This is punctured by the introduction of Aïssa, a man who has collected stories of the civil war, which he rattles off like a human encyclopedia. He talks at length about the Algerian civil war and the reasons that it remains a controversial part of the country’s heritage. As he says, “there are no books, no films, no witnesses for 200,000 deaths. Silence!” The Goncourt judges praised Daoud for giving “voice to the suffering associated with a dark period in Algeria’s history, particularly that of women”.

Eleven days after the Goncourt ceremony, a woman appeared on an Algerian news show. She wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt; her long hair was tied into a bun. This left her neck visible, and attached to it, some breathing apparatus with a cannula. She introduced herself as Saâda Arbane, 30. Daoud, she claimed, had stolen her personal details to make his bestseller. “It’s my personal life, it’s my story. I’m the only one who should determine how it should be made public.” For 25 years, she said, “I’ve hidden my story, I’ve hidden my face. I don’t want people pointing at me.” But, Arbane said, she had confided in her psychiatrist. “I had no filter, no taboos. I told her everything.” Her psychiatrist was Kamel Daoud’s wife.

Arbane is now suing Daoud in Algeria and in France, through different cases that present her position from two different angles. In Algeria, her case centres on her medical records which, she claims, were stolen from a hospital in Oran and used as research material for Daoud’s book. In France, she is suing Daoud and his publisher Gallimard for invasion of privacy and libel.

Daoud argues there is no basis for such claims, and that his work is based on many stories from the Algerian black decade. He has argued that it is not Arbane herself who is ultimately behind these cases, but that they are part of a wider attempt by the Algerian government to bring down prominent critics of the ruling regime.

In France, where news about Algeria is closely followed, the cases have become caught up in larger questions about history, colonialism and international relations. “Kamel Daoud, from ‘invasion of privacy’ to the Franco-Algerian diplomatic battle,” read a headline about his case. The legal battle brings in a wide cast of political players. Arbane is represented by famous human rights lawyer William Bourdon and his associate Lily Ravon; Daoud’s lawyer, Jacqueline Laffont-Haïk, recently defended former French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

The case against Daoud touches upon so many questions that haunt the literary world. To whom does a story belong? Is it acceptable to use another person’s tale for one’s own gain? Does the answer change when one person is a man, the other a woman; one person famous, the other the victim of an event that left her almost literally voiceless?

But the more I tried to drill down on what really happened, the question seemed an even larger one. Daoud’s defence has hinged on his persecution by the Algerian state. But what kind of behaviour can persecution justify?

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Daoud is Algeria’s best-known writer. His work has been translated into 35 languages, and he regularly writes for French outlets about Algeria and contemporary affairs. “A brilliant, indeed dazzling, thinker,” is how one critic described him. Daoud was raised by his grandparents in a small Algerian town called Mesra, while his father, a policeman, worked in different parts of the country. As a teenager, he was attracted to Islamism but quit the movement at 18. “At a certain point, I no longer felt anything,” he later told the New York Times.

In his early 20s, he turned to journalism, covering the Algerian civil war. In 1998, he reported on the massacre at Had Chekala, one of a number of villages where hundreds of people were killed during Ramadan by Islamist forces. Two years later, he started his own column in Le Quotidien d’Oran, the French-language paper in the coastal city of Oran. It was called “Raïna raïkoum”, meaning, roughly, “My opinion, your opinion”. He began to write short fiction, and in the 00s won acclaim for his short books and story collections. “He was very famous,” says Sofiane Hadjadj, his former editor at the Algerian publishing house Barzakh.

In 2010, Daoud wrote a column for Le Monde in which he reimagined the story of the unnamed Arab man murdered in Albert Camus’s existentialist novel The Stranger. He wrote from the perspective of the dead man’s brother, calling back the story told by the novel’s protagonist, a French man named Meursault. The column caught the attention of Hadjadj and his colleagues, who encouraged him to turn it into a novel which they published in Algeria in 2013.

When the novel, The Meursault Investigation, was republished in France in 2014, it became a sensation. With Daoud’s clever conceit, the novel enabled the colonised to talk back to the colonisers through a rebuttal of one of France’s most cherished literary works, itself written by a white Frenchman born in Algeria. The novel, too, offered a complex critique of Algeria’s postcolonial development. “Kamel Daoud’s novel The Meursault Investigation may have attracted more international attention than any other debut in recent years,” wrote Claire Messud in the New York Review of Books. Daoud was welcomed with coverage across the English-speaking media. The Guardian called the book an “instant classic”, and the New York Times profiled him at length. In Oran, Daoud was already a star. But after the publication of Meursault, Hadjadj says, “There was an explosion.”

The novel’s success brought Daoud unusual visibility for a writer. In Algeria, an imam accused Daoud of apostasy after one of his media appearances in which he questioned the role of religion in the Arab world. He also took a prominent place in French culture, writing a column from Algeria for Le Point, a conservative weekly, where he opined on everything from immigration to #MeToo. His writing was lyrical, sometimes impressionistic, and often returned to the dangers of fundamentalism of all kinds. “All my work,” he wrote in an introduction to a collection of the last decade’s columns, “insists on one point. ‘Be careful! A country can be lost in a minute!’”

A frequent guest on TV and radio, Daoud was a notable Algerian voice in a culture that remains often dismissive, and sometimes vindictive, towards its former colony. When President Macron made a state visit to Algeria in 2022, he took the time to have dinner with Daoud.

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While Kamel Daoud’s star was rising, Saâda Arbane was figuring out the best way to move past a terrible tragedy. She was born in 1993 in a small town in Algeria to a family of shepherds. In 2000, Islamist terrorists murdered her parents and five siblings. No one knows if there was any motivation for the attack on their town; it’s likely that, as with many in the period, there was none. The terrorists cut Arbane’s throat and left her for dead. She was six years old.

Arbane was first brought to a local hospital, then transferred to Oran, where she spent five months in a paediatric intensive care unit. From there, she was transferred to France, where she received a tracheostomy operation and was fitted with a cannula. After such an ordeal, “I don’t know that many would be still standing,” her aunt told me.

One of the paediatricians in the Algerian health service, Zahia Mentouri, decided to adopt Arbane. Her adoptive family came from a distinguished lineage: Mentouri had led paediatric intensive care units across the country and briefly been minister of health and social affairs. Her adoptive father, Tayeb Chenntouf, was a well-known historian of Algeria who belonged to a Unesco committee on African history. Together, they lived in Oran.

For some time, Arbane could only consume liquid. Although her family held out hope that surgery might allow her to speak more clearly, it was not possible to reconstruct her vocal cords. The attack left psychological scars as well. A medical report from 2001, after her transfer to France, describes how, at the beginning of a hospital stay in France, her only drawings showed plants surrounded by thorns. When she started drawing people, the same report states, they had all visible tracheostomies, covered up with scarves. (The report is included in Arbane’s evidence for her French trial.)

Arbane had trouble in school in Oran. Few people could understand her. At first, she could not even whisper. “Everyone would stare at her cannula,” said one relative. Classmates called her “Donald Duck” because of her fractured voice. Even today, Arbane’s words are not always clear to those who don’t know her well. For this article, I spoke to her twice via Zoom, with her husband acting as a kind of interpreter, repeating what she had said.

Growing up, Arbane almost never discussed what had happened to her. She did not bring it up with her family, several relatives told me, nor did they ask questions. “To be a child with a tracheostomy, to speak with a whisper, coughing through one’s neck, secreting and wiping snot from one’s neck: I was a freak show to kids and to many adults,” she told me.

Her relatives describe Arbane as someone with unusual determination. “She completes every task she starts,” said one family friend. She spent the last year of high school in France. In 2016, she married and had a son, whom she credits with saving her life. She opened a beauty salon in Oran in her late 20s. “She has fairy fingers,” the family friend said.

Arbane found comfort in riding, something that reminds her of her biological family, who kept horses. As a teenager, she competed internationally. An article in L’Écho d’Oran about the 2009 horse riding championship of the Maghreb, a high-level event, describes how “Saâda Arbane ‘knows the obstacles’; she jumps over them in silence, with determination and elegance”.

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In 2015, Arbane started to see Dr Aïcha Dahdouh, a respected psychiatrist in Oran, who was close to Arbane’s adoptive family. In Arbane’s recollection, she initially went to talk about issues she was having with her mother. Arbane met with Dahdouh in an office in the University hospital of Oran, sometimes with her mother, sometimes one on one. She found Dahdouh easy to talk to, and soon they “talked about everything”. Dahdouh, Arbane recalled, took notes during the sessions on pieces of paper which she put in a folder. (I attempted to reach Dahdouh via two email addresses and her telephone number, as well as through her husband, but she did not respond to these inquiries, nor to a detailed list of the claims made in this article.)

The relationship between Arbane and Dahdouh, Arbane’s lawyers contend, was far closer than is normal between a patient and therapist. They became friends. In texts, Dahdouh wrote to Arbane in the informal “tu” rather than the more formal “vous”. “You’re an angel,” Dahdouh wrote in one message; another she signed “big kisses”. They had sons of a similar age, for whom they discussed organising outings such as pyjama parties. “The relationship started with the children,” Arbane said when we talked. In messages, Dahdouh referred to Arbane’s son as “min [sic] petit cheri” – my little darling. Dahdouh sent a picture of herself at the beach with their sons. Another picture shows them together standing by the water. Dahdouh solicited Arbane’s help renting out an apartment she owned with Daoud.

Around the end of the Covid pandemic, in 2021 Arbane believes, she met up with Dahdouh along with their children. Dahdouh brought her husband. Despite his fame, Arbane didn’t know much about Daoud. “Reading isn’t my thing,” she told me. She sensed that he was surprised by her appearance. Dahdouh told her that she hadn’t shared any details about her background or the attack.

In Arbane’s telling, a few weeks later, during Ramadan, Dahdouh and Daoud invited her over for coffee. Daoud told her that he wanted to write a book about her story. After she refused, he said that he would respect her decision and that there were many stories like her own. He gave her a book about the Emir Abd el-Kader, a 19th-century Algerian leader, renowned for his equestrian prowess, who fought against the French colonial invader.

A short time later, according to the lawsuit, Dahdouh invited Arbane’s adoptive mother to her office and made the same offer on Daoud’s behalf. She said no and told Arbane. Her adoptive parents, Arbane says, had warned her to be careful. But they died in quick succession in 2022 and 2023. When Arbane brought up the book in a later session, Dahdouh told her, “I’m here to protect you.”

The two continued their sessions until Dahdouh and her husband left for France in 2023. Afterwards, they stayed in touch. Though the situation was uncomfortable, Arbane said, she had made clear that she did not want her life to be the basis of anything Daoud was writing. Besides, she was confident that her most personal details were protected by patient-doctor confidentiality.

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Houris was published in France in August 2024. Over the next few weeks, Arbane and her family began to receive calls and texts about the book. “I’m with a guy and his wife. They’re talking about Algeria,” a childhood friend texted Arbane in September. “He talked about a writer who published a book. And the story sounds like your life. 😱”

Arbane forwarded it to Dahdouh. “Congratulations on the book,” she wrote.

Dahdouh replied that she would bring her a copy. “The heroine has a daughter that she calls ‘ma houri’. The story sounds a bit like yours.”

Arbane continued to ask Dahdouh for an explanation. A few weeks later, Arbane wrote to her again, “Hi Aïcha, I hope you’re doing well. I got a call today from a woman saying that there’s a book that talks about [my] story by Kamel.”

The next day she received a response, much more formally written.

“Dear Saâda, I hope you’re doing well. Kamel’s writing generally provokes a lot of reactions. Some people are saying the same thing about other characters … I’ll bring you the book and you’ll read it yourself. The thing that annoys [those people] is that the character named ‘Aube’ who sounds like you is a heroine.” Dahdouh added, “I hope the story doesn’t bother you too much.”

Arbane recalls, “I had more and more questions in my head after each sentence.”

Arbane says that Dahdouh gave her a copy of the book while visiting Algeria in October 2024. The copy was dedicated with a note from Daoud. “Our country has often been saved by courageous women. You are one of them. With my admiration, Kamel.” Still, Dahdouh warned her not to read the book as it might be too emotionally heavy for her.

Arbane didn’t read it right away, and she continued her friendship with Dahdouh. A few days later, Arbane recalls, Dahdouh left her son at her house. When she came to pick him up, they began again to talk about the book. Dahdouh suggested that Daoud might give Arbane’s information to a film-maker for a possible adaptation. Arbane, she said, might benefit from money from the film and that it would allow her to buy an apartment in Spain, where her husband had family.

“This confirmed my fears,” Arbane told me. Finally, she started to read the book. She says she didn’t sleep for the next three nights. “I felt betrayed, naked,” she told me. “The entire world was reading something that was mine.” Arbane’s relatives told me that her mental health deteriorated after the book came out. Daoud “slit her throat a second time”, a relative said.

After reading the book, Arbane contacted a cousin of her adoptive father’s, who was a lawyer. On her advice, she went to the hospital in Oran where she had seen Dahdouh and requested her file. The hospital did not hand it over. She lodged a complaint on 18 November, according to her French lawyers. The judge asked for the file, she says, but the hospital said they had not found it.

In total, Arbane’s lawyers count approximately 30 similarities between Arbane and “Aube” in the novel. Both Arbane and Aube are rare survivors of a terrorist attack in which their throats were slit. Both lost the ability to speak after the attack and could only whisper. Both received tracheostomies. Arbane’s biological parents were shepherds; Aube’s parents raised sheep. Just like Arbane, Aube describes being compared to Donald Duck and recalls how, for a time, she could only eat liquid food.

Like Arbane, Aube lives in Oran; one of the apartments she lived in (including the neighbourhood, building letter and floor) is described in passing in the book. Arbane was adopted by a former minister of health, herself an adoptee; Aube was adopted by a famous lawyer, herself an adoptee. Arbane’s adoptive mother never celebrated the Muslim festival of Eid, during which sheep are traditionally slaughtered. The same is true of Aube’s adoptive mother. Both Arbane and Aube attended a high school called the Lycée Colonel Lotfi, owned a hair salon, and love perfume and horses.

Arbane’s aunt, Fadhela Chenntouf, told me that although she and her niece were very close, when she read the novel, she discovered things about Arbane that she had never known. In the book, Aube’s tattoos recall her murdered family. Arbane also has a number of tattoos, including one that recalls her biological mother. “She never said that the tattoo had a meaning for her, but she told Aïcha Dahdouh,” said Chenntouf.

Arbane’s lawyers claim that she confided in her therapist about the difficulties she’d had when she discovered she was pregnant, as Aube does in the novel. Like Aube, Arbane had acquired three pills for a possible abortion, though abortion is illegal in Algeria. Like Aube, Arbane did not take the pills and gave birth to a child. Even the scar across their neck is the same length: 17cm.

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Daoud’s response to the Arbane case shifted in the months after the publication of his novel. At first, in a 3 September interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Obs, he said he had been inspired by a “woman with a breathing tube, though she was not the only mutilated one”. This was some weeks before Arbane’s appearance on Algerian TV, in which she accused Daoud of having used her life story for the novel. The week after that, on 21 November 2024, Arbane’s Algerian lawyer, Fatima Benbraham, held a dramatic press conference, in which she announced that Arbane was suing Daoud and held up pictures of her scars. “He built his success on Saâda’s misery. For a second time, he strangled my client’s voice,” she said. “He stole her life, her story and her pain and he leaves her without any life at all.” The lawyer appeared on a TV talkshow to launch a highly personal attack on Daoud, his new life in France and his family. (Benbraham did not reply to a request for comment. Arbane changed lawyers in July 2025.)

Benbraham also filed a separate case against Daoud and Dahdouh on behalf of an association of victims of terrorism, on the ground that the book violated the 2005 reconciliation law which restricts discussion of the black decade. The law has only been invoked three times before, always in connection to political statements and never against a novelist.

After these developments, Daoud began to speak about Arbane in a different way. On 3 December 2024, almost two weeks after Benbraham’s press conference in Algiers, Daoud wrote an article in Le Point in which he referred to Arbane as a puppet of the Algerian government. “This victim of the civil war is being manipulated to achieve a goal: to kill a writer, defame his family and save the deal between this regime and these killers.” He continued: “Apart from the visible injury, there is no common ground between this woman’s unbearable tragedy and the character Aube.” In the same article, he claimed that Arbane’s story was well known in Oran, citing an article in a Dutch paper published two years before his book, though this article had only the barest outlines of her story. He did not acknowledge that he knew Arbane personally, nor that his wife had been her psychiatrist.

In February 2025, further evidence emerged that seemed to support Arbane’s claims. The French investigative outlet Mediapart revealed that the novel’s working title had been “Joie” or joy, a translation of the name Saâda. According to Mediapart, an earlier version of the text carried the following dedication: “To an extraordinary woman, the real heroine of this story.” (Daoud did not respond to Mediapart. Gallimard did not respond to several requests for comment.)

Last summer, I contacted Daoud over email. He responded almost immediately, thanking me for my interest. Over the next few months, we exchanged a few more brief emails. He declined to meet. The case that had been launched against him, he wrote, could not be fully understood without investigating “the abuses, mass arrests, the regime of terror, the suppression of the press and multiple imprisonments in Algeria”.

In recent years, Algeria has become increasingly repressive. In 2019, a popular uprising called the Hirak movement fought against the possible fifth term of president Abdelaziz Bouteflika. It was a broad movement: “Men and women, all classes, all political backgrounds as well,” according to Mouloud Boumghar, a law professor who has worked extensively on human rights in Algeria. But it was crushed with the beginning of the Covid lockdowns.

Bouteflika resigned in 2019 and died in 2021. Since 2019, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who had served in various roles in Bouteflika’s cabinet, has been president. Today, Boumghar says, no one can stand out, no voice can speak up without risking prison. “The regime once clamped down more intelligently,” he says. Now, “it’s brutal”. Since President Tebboune came to power, Daoud wrote to me, almost “no press conference, no debate, no media or partisan campaign has been allowed outside official communications”. Dozens, even hundreds of people have been arrested. “Influencers, activists, publishers, singers, military personnel, opponents.” In France, the persecution of the French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal has attracted particular attention. In 2025, Sansal, a critic of the Algerian regime, was sentenced to five years in prison for “attacking national unity”. President Macron stated that that Algeria was “dishonouring” itself in imprisoning the writer.

Daoud was not always such an outspoken critic of the Algerian government. For much of his career, according to his former editor Hadjadj, Daoud “wasn’t an ally of power, but he wasn’t an opponent”. He pointed out that President Tebboune had chosen to grant a rare interview to Daoud and a colleague at Le Point in 2021. But in the years that followed, as the government became increasingly repressive, Daoud intensified his writings against the regime, and the regime seemed to turn on him. In Le Point, Daoud described how, after he hosted Macron in Oran in 2022, guests at their dinner were “subjected to legal harassment” and the restaurant owner was forced to close his establishment for some time. “I myself faced online harassment, troll farms and surveillance.” As Franco-Algerian relations deteriorated, he felt that “the machine was about to close in on me. I am a writer, French-speaking, Arabic-speaking, independent and unique. I was called a ‘traitor’.”

In August 2023, Daoud received a phone call from the head of the secret service in Oran. He asked whether Daoud could stop by his office for coffee. “The invitation ‘to come have a coffee’ is always the prelude to an arrest in Algeria,” Daoud later wrote. Shortly thereafter, he and his family left Algeria for Paris. “When we arrived in Paris at 6am, in summer, I immediately started writing Houris, as though it were a sacred dictation.”

Since Arbane launched her legal action, Algeria has issued two international arrest warrants for Daoud; in June, he cancelled a trip to Italy out of fear of extradition. Daoud told me that, unable to return to Algeria, he has recently missed his mother’s funeral. He has pointed to the virulence of the Algerian state’s response as an explanation for the current affair. In his email to me, Daoud noted that many of the individuals who had propagated and backed the case against him had ties to the regime, suggesting that this was further evidence of a state-led campaign against him. (Arbane’s lawyers in France have filed another suit, for libel, against Daoud and the newspaper Le Figaro for a statement in which he dismissed the idea that Arbane had a case of her own and suggested that she was a tool of the Algerian state. Arbane says that she does not follow politics.)

In his emails, Daoud did not address Arbane’s specific accusations, but stated that “the character Aube is imagined, a pure fiction”. In December, I sent him a detailed list of questions relating to specific claims in this article. In response, I received an email from his lawyer, Jacqueline Laffont-Haïk, who said she and her colleagues had provided long and detailed legal submissions to the court, as well as evidence showing that “Madame Arbane’s story goes against reality”. She did not offer anything specific. When I wrote again in February to ask whether she would share this evidence, she did not reply.

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Among the literary community in Algeria, the Arbane-Daoud legal battle has been viewed with a certain ambivalence. Daoud is a polarising figure in his home country, and as he has gained readers in France, he has lost admirers in Algeria. Faris Lounis, an Algerian literary critic who has written extensively about Daoud, believes he is successful because he tells French conservatives what they want to hear. “The Algerian writer has to be useful,” he told me. (Lounis cited a column where Daoud accused French Muslims of being “useful idiots” for the French left.) In his columns in Le Point, Daoud often criticises Algeria – a fact that is interpreted differently, several people told me, coming from a writer who now lives in France. Another Algerian reader described Daoud’s columns to me in this way: “It’s Arabs, Muslims, Arabs, Muslims, morning, noon and night – that’s only a slight caricature.”

And although Houris was well received in France, its reception among Algerian readers and scholars of the country has been more complicated. Tristan Leperlier, a scholar of novels of the black decade, has described Houris as a “heavily political novel, bogged down in cliched images, caricaturing oppressed yet heroic women and violent imams”. Leperlier and others point out that numerous books and films in Algeria have been made about the civil war, many of them by women, something Daoud has largely passed over in interviews.

Yet no one disputes that the Algerian state really has made life impossible for Daoud. According to Lounis, “There’s the use of Saâda Arbane’s story [by Daoud] … That’s one fact. And there’s another: the instrumentalisation of the case by the Algerian state.” “He’s living through something absolutely terrible,” says Hadjadj, who described the Algerian media campaign against Daoud as a “lynching”. But, he notes, it has ended up “overshadowing Saâda’s story”.

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In France, the Daoud case almost immediately got mixed up with that of Sansal, said Elisabeth Philippe, a prominent literary critic and an editor at Le Nouvel Observateur. “Very quickly, we made it into a political issue,” she told me. From that point on, it was inevitable that the story would be swirled together with the rancorous public conversation about the Franco-Algerian relationship, which, in France today, almost always ends up becoming a conversation about Islam and immigration. To take one example of many: on French TV in June, during a discussion about Boualem Sansal, the contrarian writer Pascal Bruckner called Algerians a “brainless people”. “They kicked us out,” he said, “and now they want to come here.”

Amid the furore, Houris has sold over 450,000 copies and English rights have been bought. In July, when Daoud appeared on the radio station France Inter, the conversation was dominated by the jailing of the Algerian writer Sansal. The question about Arbane focused on Daoud’s feelings, rather than the substance of her allegations. “Between these legal trials, Boualem Sansal’s fate in prison, the pain of exile, but also the recognition you have achieved as a popular writer, how did you live through and cross this year full of headwinds?” (Sansal was released from prison in November 2025.)

The legal case in France is still ongoing. Arbane’s French lawyers have focused on the question of privacy infringement. They seem to have precedent on their side. Thirteen years ago, William Bourdon, the lawyer for Arbane, won a case against a French author who was found to have used details about her husband’s former partner in a novel. She and her editor had to pay €40,000 in compensation. Arbane’s case in Algeria appears to have stalled. Her lawyer there did not respond to multiple requests for comment. One source, a journalist, speculated that the Algerian authorities may be waiting for the outcome of the case in France.

Daoud has built his career on his singularity: an Algerian man from a small town who ended up rewriting a Nobel laureate, a writer who can speak to both an Algerian audience and a French one. In a short book published last year, he described his pride at being “unfaithful to rigidity, to fixity … a proponent of plurality, multiplicity, variance and wandering”. The book’s title is Sometimes, One Must Betray.

But pushing against an authoritarian regime, which requires a stubborn self-belief, can impose its own kind of rigidity. In our exchanges, Daoud presented himself as fighting against a larger Algerian machine. “I attempted to illustrate the long process of healing that ‘Aube’ courageously undertook, but which Algeria itself rejects; instead, it is the writer who is criminalised for his work, while those responsible for Algeria’s bloody decade enjoy pensions and total impunity.”

Houris is a novel about sacrifice. Aube describes herself as an unwitting sacrifice of both the terrorists of the civil war and the modern state. She compares herself and her injury to that of animals slaughtered during the religious festival of Eid. Daoud appears to be asking about the sacrifices that victims of the civil war have been asked to make in order for the Algerian state to move forward. What have modern Algerians been asked to conceal, to forget, to suppress for the sake of their country? In our exchanges, he suggested that he, too, had sacrificed. To write about the civil war, he said, was to expose himself to danger. “The period is taboo; whoever talks about it risks going to jail.”

To write someone’s story, as Arbane alleges, is to demand a different kind of sacrifice. Over and over, in reading Daoud’s many responses to the legal cases, I noted how Arbane, her claims, her person, were absent from his view of the work he had done. For each specific point raised about Arbane, Daoud’s response would turn to the crisis in Algeria, or the forgotten civil war, deflecting questions about a single, living woman with comments about 200,000 dead.

Towards the end of Houris, Aube returns to Had Chekala, “to the heart of her own story”. The novel’s plot, until then tightly controlled, appears to unravel. The pace speeds, the characters take on the sheen of allegory. The village is filled with mysterious donkey heads. An imam in a mosque is also a butcher. It is implied that he and his twin brother participated in violent acts during the war. Aube is attacked and tied up in a shed. But before her throat is cut one last time, she is saved unexpectedly by Aïssa.

In the midst of all this, Aube tries to speak but she cannot produce a sound. Her voice “rustles like crumpled leaves” and “scatters in handfuls of sand”. She begins to cry. Why did she come all of this way only to find herself locked away? Why is she the only survivor who seeks the truth about the war? She thinks to herself, “I was an offering wondering what the point of its sacrifice had been.”

The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, whose novels, travel writing and translations made him a prominent literary figure in postwar Europe, has died aged 92.

Publishing house De Bezige Bij said in a statement on Wednesday evening that Nooteboom had “passed away very peacefully on his beloved island Menorca”. The statement was made on behalf of the author’s wife, the photographer Simone Sassen.

“We will miss the friendship, erudition, enthusiasm and individuality of this internationally acclaimed writer,” it said.

Nooteboom first made a name for himself in the Netherlands with his 1955 debut novel Philip and the Others. Based on long hitchhiking trips to the Mediterranean and through Scandinavia, it won the Anne Frank prize and became a Dutch literary classic.

He achieved his international breakthrough with his 1980 novel Rituals, about two friends – one of whom breaks rules frequently while the other follows them strictly. The book was turned into a film in 1988 and became his first work to be published in English translation.

Born in The Hague on 31 July 1933, Nooteboom told the Guardian in a 2006 interview that he had no childhood memories until the outbreak of the second world war.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, “we watched on the horizon the glow of Rotterdam burning and I remember being very afraid and having to have cold water thrown in my face to calm me down”.

His father was later killed when a British air raid levelled a residential quarter of The Hague “by mistake”.

Germany was later one of the European countries were Nooteboom’s fiction and travel writing found even greater critical acclaim and commercial success than at home.

As well as writing his own work, Nooteboom translated works from English into Dutch, such as poetry by Ted Hughes and Czesław Miłosz, and the plays of Brendan Behan and Seán O’Casey.

He was awarded honorary doctorates from universities in Brussels, Nijmegen, Berlin and, in 2019, the University College London.

Each December, hundreds of thousands of diaspora Nigerians and Ghanaians travel to their ancestral home countries. For many, the draw is the end-of-year party season – better known as “Detty December”, a phrase popularised by Nigerian singer Mr Eazi in the late 2010s. This wave of travel used to simply be a time for diasporans to reunite with their families for Christmas, but in recent years it has evolved, with young people – who call themselves IJGBs (I Just Got Back) – making the most of the buzzing nightlife in cultural capitals Lagos and Accra.

This annual diaspora homecoming is now being fictionalised in The Full Picture by Canadian author Jessica Carmichael, a YA coming-of-age romance bringing the family reunions, festivities, and endless traffic of December to life on the page. The novel follows Robyn, a Canadian university student, who travels to Ghana during winter break for the first time since her Ghanaian mum died. On her trip, she uncovers family secrets and finds herself in a love triangle with Osei, her grandmother’s neighbour, and Kelvin, Osei’s childhood friend. The book was published by Hibiscus Press, which Carmichael founded herself with funding support from Edmonton Arts Council.

Like her protagonist, Carmichael is a Canadian of Ghanaian and Bajan descent. Growing up in Canada, she did not see YA fiction with characters that looked like her, and the African fiction she came across often tended to be more serious – so she wanted to represent young Africans in a light yet thoughtful way.

Her novel isn’t the first fiction to explore the Detty December phenomenon; a Nigerian publication, Noisy Streetss, has published short story anthologies on “Love in Detty December”. But in The Full Picture, Carmichael captures Detty December in Ghana in longform fiction from the perspective of a diasporan travelling home. “It is something that you don’t really see in fiction,” says Carmichael, adding that she would “love to see more”.

Carmichael points out that there is scope for Detty December fiction to be explored from other cultural perspectives, given that people from the world over travel to west Africa in December. She would love to see stories “from a Black American perspective, from a Caribbean perspective”.

It was after visiting Ghana for the first time in 2019 to see her grandmother that Carmichael was inspired to write her novel. At the time, it was the Year of the Return, a government initiative that invited the Black diaspora to visit Ghana to commemorate 400 years since the arrival of the first recorded enslaved Africans in Virginia. Carmichael says the trip “changed the trajectory of my life”.

On her return to Canada, she read a lot of Ghanaian fiction that brought her closer to her culture, and later decided she wanted to write a novel herself. Her book features all the hallmarks of Detty December, from the vibrant nightlife to the inflated prices and different diasporas coming together to reconnect with their cultures. “I felt that there was a massive gap in the market, and I wanted to write a story that could make people feel as if they were back there when reading it,” she says.

Carmichael sees her novel as a departure from other writing on diasporic travel and migration. She had noticed a trope of disillusionment and alienation from the culture in books on diasporans travelling home. Visiting Ghana herself, Carmichael’s experience was very different – she felt embraced and welcomed by the local community.

Carmichael hopes her book – which has found fans on TikTok – will inspire more people to write about Detty December. “I’m all for it, because you go for maybe three, four weeks and you come home and you’re back to regular life. So I think it would be amazing to relive it in fiction.”

If there can be a downside to receiving a lifetime achievement award, it can surely only be the hint of closure it evokes. I put this as tactfully as I can to Alan Hollinghurst, this year’s winner of the David Cohen prize, which has previously recognised the contribution to literature of, among others, VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien. It does have “a certain hint of the obituary about it”, he concedes, laughing. “So I’m very much doing what I can to take it as an incentive rather than a reward.”

But there have been plenty of rewards recently. Hollinghurst was knighted in this year’s New Year honours list, a couple of months after the publication of his novel Our Evenings, the story of actor Dave Win’s journey from boarding school to the end of his life, which received rave reviews. In the Guardian, critic Alexandra Harris announced it his finest novel to date, noting that it “forms a deep pattern of connection with its predecessors, while being an entirely distinct and brimming whole”.

One of those predecessors is The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker prize in 2004 and was shortly afterwards adapted for television, providing an early leading role for actor Dan Stevens. This autumn, Hollinghurst’s tour d’horizon of the Thatcher era as seen through the eyes of Nick Guest, a young man taken up by a wealthy and politically powerful family, also became a stage play at London’s Almeida theatre in a version by Jack Holden, directed by Michael Grandage. It has been one of the season’s hottest tickets, I remark: “absolutely scorching”, replies Hollinghurst, who is witty and charmingly self-deprecating in conversation, and yet never less than attentive and serious.

How has he found the process of watching a novel of more than 500 pages with multiple characters and settings transform into a far less populous and tighter two hours on stage? “It’s been converted into a completely different medium with completely different terms and considerations,” he says. “And I found that rather fascinating. Of course, it’s different. Of course, there are all sorts of things which aren’t in the book, certainly a lot of characters that are not in the play, and a certain amount of amalgamation of characters. Jack Holden has done something very skilful. I think there are six really horrible characters in the book that he’s compressed into one really monstrously horrible character.”

Who does he miss? “Well, I was very sorry to lose Lady Partridge [the grandmother], who’s one of my favourite characters, and also the rather hot waiter from Madeira. But you can’t have everything.” He read successive drafts, he tells me, and gave his feedback, “but I was very wary of giving novelist’s notes: you know, do you think that’s quite consistent? And shouldn’t we say a little bit more about so and so? And why doesn’t he go on to say …? Which is me sort of clinging to my own material. Actually, the priorities of the stage are quite different, and things which I feel might need to be explained can be conveyed by a gifted actor, just in a look or a gesture.”

The novel looked back to a time nearly 20 years previously and the play appears nearly another 20 years after that, so there’s an increasing sense of The Line of Beauty as a key to an intense but very different social and political moment. This production, Hollinghurst notes, “involves young actors who were born long after Mrs Thatcher ceased to be a player, and who know nothing about the Aids crisis. So there is partly a kind of educational dimension to something which is set in this specific historical period.”

He’s extremely generous about the information deficits of younger generations: “It’s very easy for an old person to bemoan the things that young people don’t know, but of course young people know so many things that I don’t.” But in truth, his novels have been casting a light on the particularities and texture of English life, and of the experiences of gay people, since his electrifying debut, The Swimming-Pool Library, appeared in 1988. The novel started its life, he explains, when he was still on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement, and consequently short of spare time. To impose order on the process, he started it on 1 January 1984, writing in a large-format desk diary. “I just decided I would write a page a day, and at the end of the year I’d have a novel. In the middle of April, I was quite seriously behind: in fact it took me about two and a half years to get to December 31st.”

It was worth persisting: the novel won the Somerset Maugham award, and began a publishing career that now extends to seven novels, appearing roughly every half-dozen years and arguably providing this country’s most acute literary representation of gay life to date. Each of Hollinghurst’s books has been eagerly anticipated by his readers, not merely for his grasp of the dynamics of personal and social relationships set against panoramic backdrops, but for the sheer beauty of his prose; close-up observations of the minute-to-minute materiality of life interspersed with journeys through characters’ interior mental and emotional landscapes. They are often elegiac, but also very funny and, as Hollinghurst has often pointed out, are intended to entertain.

Both The Swimming-Pool Library and his second novel, The Folding Star (1994), turned on the revelation of a secret – “rather clunky plot structures”, he says now, which “increasingly came to feel not like life to me” – but in his last three novels, The Stranger’s Child, The Sparsholt Affair and Our Evenings, Hollinghurst has moved into the arena of whole-life novels. In each case, the narrative advances by years between discrete sections, leaving the reader to gather what has happened in the intervening periods. Was that a way to convey dramatic changes in society, and especially in gay life – to talk about what alters, and what stays the same?

“One can take a generally ameliorative view of change,” he says, thoughtfully, “which is something I think has obtained over the period in gay history, for instance, that I’ve written about: moving from severe legal oppression and social difficulties and so on into an unrecognisably changed period of legal and social freedom and acceptance. And then the sense which we have increasingly at the moment, with the rise of the right everywhere, of these freedoms in which I’ve happily lived my adult life becoming vulnerable.” In that context, he thinks, the latest incarnation of The Line of Beauty has “a sort of admonitory quality … And I think that was something I wanted to touch on in Our Evenings, too, that these cycles of racial violence and so forth, we keep thinking that’s in the past, and then they flare up with horrible new intensity.”

Dave Win, the protagonist of Our Evenings, is brought up in a small, semi-rural town by a single mother, Avril, a white woman. His father, whom she met during a brief period of working in Burma, is absent, and further details about him are obscured from both his son and the reader. Throughout his life, Dave is thrust into successive situations where his identity – as a scholarship boy at a public boarding school, sponsored by a philanthropic couple; as a young gay man; as an actor searching for roles from which his ethnicity does not exclude him – marginalises him.

In that respect, he’s the opposite of The Line of Beauty’s Nick Guest, one of several polished interlopers who have little problem in gaining an entree into elite society and thereafter wreaking havoc. (I ask Hollinghurst whether he felt that the makers of the film Saltburn had taken The Line of Beauty very much to heart and he bursts out laughing: “Well, I’m not sure. I don’t think I’m the only person who’s come up with that scenario.”) Guest’s ambiguity stems from our uncertainty of how intentional his destructiveness is; Win’s from his far less powerful adjacency to privilege.

“I do think of him as being more unambiguously a sympathetic character,” Hollinghurst says of his latest leading man, “and one that people have liked and sort of gone along with, with a kind of unselfconscious warmth that they don’t necessarily feel towards Nick Guest.” Much of that has to do with the strikingly tender portrayal of the bond between David, his mother and later, her partner, Esme. “Obviously the relationship with his mum was always going to be a central part of it. And just trying to depict the longest, largest relationship in his life, so much of it being made up of things which are never said, and yet its fundamental importance. I’m pleased that people seem to have been touched by that.”

Win, like Guest and like Hollinghurst himself, is an only child, and I tell the author that I’m constantly fascinated by how many of his characters don’t have siblings. Does he think it’s significant?

“I think perhaps it is, because as an only child you become quite accustomed to your own society, and you become rather imaginatively self-sufficient. But then your life repeatedly puts you in situations where you’re engaging with another family, another social system, whatever it might be, and you have to learn how to do it. I can remember in my life feeling that I’d passed a sort of threshold and I’d learned how to perform. And perhaps all people growing up do this, you know, but suddenly gaining a social confidence, knowing how to behave. It struck me very much, actually, looking at the play, and seeing how Nick in the first half is rather watchfully sort of fitting in with this family, and in the second half, his behaviour has changed, and he’s become a performer among them. He’s become a little star in the world. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong, but that just brought back to me those moments of feeling that I’d sort of mastered the situation, or I was no longer terrified of it.”

Winning the David Cohen prize and watching the theatrical release of a work written two decades ago have involved a certain amount of looking back. Of the prize, he recalls going to the awards ceremony as “a young TLS staffer, going along to see Harold Pinter getting it, and seeing Muriel Spark getting it. And since then, it’s been won by all sorts of people who actually have been huge figures in my own mental literary landscape: Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn, Michael Holroyd, very different writers, but it just seemed to be the supreme kind of accolade. So it’s very astonishing to have got it.”

Less immediately tangible are his thoughts about the development of his approach to writing. He’s been wondering, he says, about the connection between the 29-year-old who started writing in pages of a desk diary – all his books until The Stranger’s Child were written in longhand, but then he got “a bit fidgety” and started to play around on screen – and the 71-year-old he is now.

Despite the cyclical nature of oppression, the landscape he’s written about has radically changed. In The Sparsholt Affair, a character struggles to get to grips with the new and often app-based world of sexual relationships, although Hollinghurst points out, humorously, that “he does master it and he has a hookup”. A pause. “He comes to feel it’s not really for him.”

“Part of this habitual looking back has involved me in going into times when these things were secret and dangerous, and there were codes of behaviour. I remember, when I was very young, older gay men slightly lamenting that gay lib had taken all the excitement out of it, that the illegality gave it this extraordinary erotic charge. I mean, generally, that’s not my view, I much prefer to be living in the time we’re in now, but I think it’s part of a much larger change, particularly over the last 20 years, in notions of privacy.”

On a practical level, he says, the dissolution of privacy is a good thing, meaning that “gay men and women are not living their lives in the shadows, in fear, they’re just living them as anybody else would”. But is it harder to write about people when they are more apparently open, when, as he says, “go on to whichever app you favour, and there turn out to be 80 people ready within a 100-yard radius and you’re immediately confronted with the most intimate aspects of total strangers’ lives”? Or is it fun?

“There is something sort of exciting about that idea of instant gratification. But I think it goes against my natural temperament as a writer, which is that sense of expectation, anticipation, frustration, actually being much more interesting. And as everybody knows, anticipated excitement or anticipation is often better than the fulfilment. So yes, I think temperamentally, I’m not so interested in writing about the new world of dissolved privacy.”

Hollinghurst has often been praised for his ability to conjure social scenes, from grand parties to far smaller-scale encounters. But he is also closely attuned to life’s longueurs, to periods in which little happens beyond waiting for things to get going. Creatively speaking, though, he is not himself suffering from a lack of activity or impetus.

“There’s part of me which would quite like to retire. And part of me which, having seen people who retire and are utterly miserable and directionless, knows very well that I don’t want to. I’ve spent my whole adult life with a book sort of simmering in the background and having this other place to go to and mess around in. I always enjoy the period of relief after a book comes out, when I don’t have to think about that for a while, but then I begin to miss it. So I hope soon to get cracking on something else.”