Alan Hollinghurst

Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, the only child of James Hollinghurst, a bank manager who served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War,[1] and his wife, Elizabeth.[2][3] He attended Canford School in Dorset.[4]

Hollinghurst studied English at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving a BA in 1975 and MLitt in 1979. His thesis was on the works of Ronald Firbank, E. M. Forster and L. P. Hartley, three gay writers.[5][6] While at Oxford he shared a house with future poet laureate Andrew Motion, and was awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry in 1974, a year before Motion.

In the late 1970s he became a lecturer at Magdalen College, and then at Somerville and at Corpus Christi. In 1981 he moved on to lecture at University College London, and in 1982 he joined The Times Literary Supplement, where he was the paper's deputy editor from 1985 to 1990.[7][8]

Hollinghurst is gay[9][10][11] and lives in London.[12]

He won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.[11] His next novel, The Stranger's Child, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011.[13]

Although he now lives with his partner Paul Mendez,[14] Hollinghurst previously described: "I'm not at all easy to live with. I wish I could integrate writing into ordinary social life, but I don't seem to be able to. I could when I started [writing]. I suppose I had more energy then. Now I have to isolate myself for long periods."[15]

As a younger writer, before he received The Booker Prize, Hollinghurst discussed his early life and literary influences at length during a rare interview at his London home. This interview was published in 1997-98 in The James White Review.[16]

In 1974, Hollinghurst was awarded the Newdigate Prize.

In 1989, Hollinghurst won the Somerset Maugham Award for The Swimming Pool Library.

In 1994, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Folding Star.

In 2004, he won the Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty.[11]

In 2011, his novel The Stranger's Child was longlisted for the Booker Prize.[13]

He received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 2011.

• An Interview at the Oxonian Review
• Alan Hollinghurst at British Council: Literature includes a "Critical Perspective" section
• Alan Hollinghurst at The New York Review of Books
• Alan Hollinghust Profile in The Guardian
• 2011 radio interview at The Bat Segundo Show
• Peter Terzian (Winter 2011). "Alan Hollinghurst, The Art of Fiction No. 214". The Paris Review.