Alan Hollinghurst

Available for over a year

Where can we escape to at times when we are cooped up, locked down, trapped indoors? Some people recall a real location - a favoured corner to which they return again and again, what the Swedes call a "wild strawberry place"; others find a refuge deep in the imagination. In these exceptional times, Radio 3 has specially commissioned five major writers to share their special place, and each night of the week, one of them offers to take us there and share it with us. For Alan Hollinghurst, who has lived in London for the past 40 years, it is a plantation of poplars in the Gloucestershire countryside, near to the house where he grew up: In these dark times, as spring advances outside his urban window, he says: "I think of myself ducking and threading my way through the wood and into the great nave of trees as it bursts into life." Producer: Beaty Rubens