Author Alan Hollinghurst celebrates his 70th birthday today.
The author won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for his novel In The Line of Beauty which told the story of a young gay man and his contemporaries from university against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s.
The book was later adapted into a television mini-series starring Dan Stevens and Tim McInnerney.
Hollinghurst won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1988 with his novel The Swimming Pool Library which addresses homophobia by telling the story of Will, a privileged, gay, sexually irresistible 25-year-old, who saves the life of an elderly aristocrat who has a heart-attack in a public lavatory.
This chance meeting ultimately requires Will to re-evaluate his sense of the past and his family’s history.
His other books include The Folding Star, The Spell, The Stranger’s Child and The Sparshot Affair. In 2017 Hollinghurst generated controversy when he declared the ‘gay novel’ was dead, which lead to some negative feedback from other writers.
Hollinghurst lives in London with partner, the writer Paul Mendez.
This post was first published in 2020 and has been updated.
