Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty was announced as the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2004 yesterday. Most newspaper headlines focus on the gay aspect of the novel which is set in the 1980s up to the moment Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. Hollinghurst’s book was one of three favourites to win, along with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Colm Tóibin’s The Master. Apparently these three were extremely close. I thought Mitchell had it in the bag, so the winner was a surprise to me.
Hollinghurst studied and taught English at Oxford. His previous novels are The Swimming Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1994, which was shortlisted for the Booker) and The Spell (1998). For several years, he was Deputy Editor of The Times Literary Supplement and he was picked as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 1993.
See The Guardian’s report on Hollinghurt’s Booker triumph along with his rather startled looking mugshot.
