High camp in running shoes with a Booker-winner

British author Alan Hollinghurst has a reputation of shocking with vivid sex scenes. Picture / Martin Sykes

Part of me was looking forward to meeting Alan Hollinghurst. Having loved his Man Booker-winning novel so much, I was predisposed to like him. Another part of me wasn't sure.

Because - and this is one of the things that happens to you when you win the Booker - I'd read so much about him in which he came across as reserved, slightly superior, austere. He was a bit of a fogey and so on.

None of these things would have made him any less interesting, of course, but they might have made him hard work. And also when you like a book, it is quite nice, although not at all essential, to like the bloke who wrote it.

I was a bit disappointed when I met him. He was wearing running shoes and continued to wear them - I know because I asked - at the posh opening party of the Writers and Readers Festival that evening.

God knows what I thought he should be wearing: something old fogeyish, I suppose. Or more formal, at least. He writes so terribly formally you see, in what is usually called a high literary style. I'd have quite liked him to be wearing a smoking jacket with velvet lapels which would have boosted another reputation he has: for high camping it with relish.

Anyway, I knew I'd enjoy him pretty much immediately. In response to asking whether he had the best room in the Hilton of all the writers, as befitting his Booker-winning status, he said: "I jolly well hope so," in a fine parody of a pompous author.

"You don't want to believe everything you read," he says when I'm done telling him about my impressions gleaned from reading about him. What a shame because I rather like the idea of an old fogey who writes shocking sex scenes.

I had read that he likes to "shock with vivid sex scenes". Yet I , all too easily shocked by sex scenes, have failed miserably to be so jolted. Sorry about that, I say. "I'm very glad to hear it," he says. I tell him I thought I might be deficient in some way, not to have noticed that I was supposed to be shocked.

"Au contraire," he says. "I've never sought to shock. What a futile sort of ambition." Well, yes, and almost impossible to achieve. "Quite. Shock is such a transient phenomenon, isn't it?"

A cartoon image of a Tube carriage packed with people reading Hollinghurst and twitching in unison as though electrocuted draws itself in my head. I tell him about this and he says "ha, yes". But he does see that when his first book came out "there hadn't really been much serious fiction written about this gay sexual behaviour. It sort of throws people."

When he won the Booker, the Express ran the headline: Gay Sex Wins Booker. His response was wittier than the headline. He said: "If only it was that easy." Now he says that of course a tabloid wasn't going to run a headline which read: Novel About Young Henry James Enthusiast Wins Booker.

The thing about the Booker is that if you win it - and he hadn't won it when he was invited to the festival, so they unwittingly "bagged a Booker" - you stop doing the thing you won it for, which is writing.

What you do is talk for a year or so about a book you wrote years ago. And have people like me say: "We want another book. Get on with it." I said this at the end of the interview and he said he would, right away, and made as though to sprint up the hall. Lucky, then, he was wearing running shoes.

Some people might be able to talk about one book while writing another but not Hollinghurst. He needs quiet and isolation to write. In his flat on the top floor of the big Victorian house in Hampstead, he puts in ear plugs and "I even close the curtains". He's not sure where this growing need for creating the perfect working environment will end. "I just have to have the space and the silence and I'm more crotchety about noise as I get older."

Ha. So he is quite crotchety? "I'm getting a bit that way. I don't know but everything used to be a lot easier. I wrote my first book in the evenings when I got home from the office [he was deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement until 1995] and just opened a bottle of wine and got on with it.

"Now I have to really sort of isolate a long period of time and go into a kind of mental retreat." He thought about the prize winning The Line of Beauty for two years before he wrote the first chapter. He has no date set to start the thinking again: "It's kind of like giving up smoking on a fixed date in the future. A formalisation of the whole thing."

When he does begin, he takes the phone off the hook at 8am, and allows himself one outing a week, usually to the cinema. "I'm beginning to sound rather mad, aren't I?" He would really be quite pleased if he was not portrayed "as this weird sort of recluse".

This doesn't sound at all mad to me, it sounds like heaven. It also sounds as though he is terribly good at sorting his life into the compartments authors need in order to write. Because there is also the Hollinghurst - and here's another nice image of the fogeyish middle-aged writer - who likes clubbing and taking Ecstasy.

"Yes, I do go clubbing from time to time, I love all that."

"What, all that taking Ecstasy?" I'm teasing him here; he takes it very well. "Oh, of course all that taking Ecstasy. Umm, what can one say in the press?"

He settles on saying that it was "something that I just discovered rather later in life than most people do and thought was jolly nice".

Well, good. I wouldn't want to think of him spending his entire life with the curtains shut.

Although he has to spend some time there in order to do the thinking and writing. It is this process readers are fascinated by: the mysterious necessities writing which no author wants to examine too thoroughly.

This is why readers come to festivals.

They also come to ask "the certain questions I've been asked so many hundreds of times. 'Do you see yourself as a gay writer?' 'How do you react when people tell you you're a gay writer?' I don't know why people want to know so obsessively."

This is very good because it means I don't have to ask those questions. He could reply, I suggest: "Why do you want to know so obsessively?"

"Ha. I say that I don't mind unless that is taken to be the only thing about my work which is interesting."

He would never be rude - he has the perfect manners of a middle class boy who was sent off to boarding school at the age of 7 - but he's not about to let you get away with anything either. When I say "thank you for making it possible for me not to ask those questions. I much appreciate it," he points out, grinning, that "you asked me what my answer would be if someone did ask".

Serves me right for the Ecstasy tease. To make up for it I'll say this about Alan Hollinghurst: I can't think of a writer whose next book I'd rather read, or an old fogey I'd rather go to a nightclub with.