Hollinghurst, Alan (1954– )

English writer. His novels explore contemporary homosexual culture and relationships using a high literary style. His novel The Line of Beauty (2004; 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction) depicts a young Oxford graduate in London searching for love during the boom years of the 1980s.

Other novels include The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), an account of homosexual life in the early 1980s through the eyes of a young aristocrat, The Folding Star (1994), a story of a private tutor who develops an obsession with his pupil, and Spell (1998), a comedy of manners. The Folding Star received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Hollinghurst received his degree from Magdalen College, Oxford, and wrote for the Times Literary Supplement 1982–95.