Hollinghurst, Alan (1954-…), a British author, won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty (2004). The Man Booker Prize, now known as the Booker Prize, is the United Kingdom’s highest literary award. Hollinghurst’s fiction deals with gay themes, shifting between the comic and the tragic. Critics have praised the writer for his vivid character portraits and for a witty, sophisticated style that has been compared to the style of the American author Henry James.
The action in The Line of Beauty takes place from 1983 to 1987. The central character is Nick Guest, a gay young man from the English provinces who settles in London. Guest moves into the home of his friend Toby, whose wealthy father is a Conservative member of Parliament. Guest eventually has two love affairs, first with a black government worker and then with a Lebanese millionaire. The book ends as the AIDS epidemic begins its devastating sweep through the gay community. The novel is noted for its satirical portrait of the role that money and power politics played in England during the administration of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s.
Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), traces the homosexual lifestyle in London from the early 1900’s to the early 1980’s. The Folding Star (1994) tells about a 33-year-old English tutor in Belgium who develops a passion for a 17-year-old male student. The Spell (1998) follows the complex relationships among four gay British men in the 1990’s. The Stranger’s Child (2011) revolves around the life, love affairs, and works of a homosexual poet killed in World War I (1914-1918). In The Sparsholt Affair (2017), Hollinghurst primarily portrays a gay man’s search for love and artistic expression in England from the 1970’s to the early 2000’s.
Hollinghurst was born on May 26, 1954, in Stroud, England. He attended Oxford University, receiving a B.A. degree in 1975 and an M.Litt. degree in 1979. He was a lecturer at Oxford from 1977 to 1981. Hollinghurst worked as an editor at The Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995. His first published work was a collection of poems, Confidential Chats with Boys (1982).
