The Line Of Beauty author Alan Hollinghurst honoured with knighthood
He won the Booker Prize in 2004 for The Line Of Beauty, the first work of gay fiction to win the prestigious literary award.
British author Alan Hollinghurst said he is “delighted and deeply touched” to be awarded a knighthood in the New Year Honours list for services to literature.
The 70-year-old writer earned the Booker Prize with The Line Of Beauty in 2004, the first work of gay fiction to win the prestigious literary award.
He said in a statement to the PA news agency: “I’m delighted and deeply touched to be given this quite unexpected honour for doing something I have always loved doing: making up stories about the world I’ve inherited and tried to play my part in.
“I take it as a great encouragement to keep going”.
Sir Alan was born in Gloucestershire and went on to study at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he later became a lecturer, before moving to London.
The former Times Literary Supplement deputy editor’s first novel, 1988’s The Swimming-Pool Library, was a critical and awards success and dealt with being gay in an intimate detail, something that was rare at the time.
It would go on to win the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award and the 1991 Forster Award.
He then published The Folding Star, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and The Spell, before writing 2004’s The Line Of Beauty.
His novel, set during the Margaret Thatcher years and framed by her 1983 and 1987 general election victories, was not seen as the favourite to win the Booker Prize in 2004 as Sir Alan recalled to the literary award’s website.
He said: “There was a quite strong expectation that (Cloud Atlas author) David Mitchell would win, and the TV cameramen, who of course know the outcome in advance, appeared to be gathered round his table; but then my name was read out, and they swivelled as one towards me.”
His book is about Nick Guest, a young aesthete and Oxford graduate who moves into the London home of his university friend, Toby Fedden, the son of a rising Conservative MP.
This brings Nick into a world of privilege, with him meeting Baroness Thatcher at a party while high on cocaine, as it chronicles the spread of Aids and the hero’s sexual conquests.
In 2006, Pride And Prejudice screenwriter Andrew Davies brought the novel to the small screen with a BBC adaptation starring Downton Abbey actor Dan Stevens as Nick and Blackadder star Tim McInnerny as Toby’s father Gerald Fedden.
Sir Alan has gone on to follow up the book with The Stranger’s Child, dealing with gay themes during the First World War, which made the Booker longlist, won the French literary prize Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize.
His recent books, The Sparsholt Affair in 2017 and Our Evenings in 2024, also deal with gay and class themes.
In 2009, Sir Alan was among 10 high-profile gay people, including Sir Elton John, to be invited by the National Portrait Gallery to choose individuals who had inspired them for a specially created exhibition.
He chose the writer Ronald Firbank, who died in May 1926 and wrote about sexuality and class.
Sir Alan was elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 1995 and was made an honorary fellow by Magdalen College in 2013.
