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Alan Hollinghurst

Novelist and poet Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, England in 1954 and attended Magdalen College in Oxford.

His acclaimed first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), gives a vivid account of London gay life in the early 1980s through the story of a young aristocrat, William Beckwith, and his involvement with the elderly Lord Nantwich. Hollinghurst followed this with The Folding Star in 1994, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The narrator, Edward Manners, develops an obsessive passion for his pupil, a 17-year-old Flemish boy, in a story that many critics compared to Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice. The Spell (1998), a gay comedy of manners interweaves the complex relationships between 40-something architect Robin Woodfield, his alcoholic lover Justin, and Justin's ex, who falls in love with Robin's son Danny.

Hollinghurst's most recent novel, The Line of Beauty (2004), traces a gay man's sexual and political awakening in 1980s England and won the 2004 Booker Prize. Andrew Davies adapted the novel for BBC Television in 2006.