Alan Hollinghurst
Alan James Hollinghurst (born 26 May 1954) is a globally recognized English novelist, poet, short story writer, and translator. Alan Hollinghurst wrote six novels: The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger's Child, and most recently The Sparsholt Affair. All of them have received great success despite exploring various facets of British gay life and history. Since 1988, Alan has played a significant role in the canon of British LGBTQ literature. He received the EM Forster Award, a 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In 1993, he was named one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists, and in 1994, he received a Booker Prize nomination.
His most famous work - The Line of Beauty won the 2004 Man Booker Prize and was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Novel Award, as well as many other important awards like the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and America’s National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel was also adapted for BBC2 by Andrew Davies. Alan Hollinghurst himself was nominated for the British Book Awards Author of the Year Prize in the same year.
Hollinghurst is gay and lives in London. Although Hollinghurst now shares a home with his partner Paul Mendez, he previously stated: "I'm not at all easy to live with. I wish I could integrate writing into ordinary social life, but I don't seem to be able to. I could when I started [writing]. I suppose I had more energy then. Now I have to isolate myself for long periods."
