Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst at the 2011 Texas Book Festival
Alan Hollinghurst at the 2011 Texas Book Festival
Born (1954-05-26) 26 May 1954 (age 69)
Stroud, Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom
OccupationWriter, translator
Alma materMagdalen College, Oxford
(BA, MLitt)
Period1975–
GenreNovel, poem, short story
Notable worksThe Swimming Pool Library
The Folding Star
The Spell
The Line of Beauty
The Stranger's Child
The Sparsholt Affair
Notable awardsNewdigate Prize
1974
Stonewall Book Award
1989
Somerset Maugham Award
1989
James Tait Black Memorial Prize
1994
Booker Prize
2004

Alan James Hollinghurst FRSL (born 26 May 1954) is an English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2004 Booker Prize.

Early life and education

Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, only child of bank manager James Hollinghurst, who served in the RAF in the Second World War, and his wife, Elizabeth. He attended Dorset's Canford School.

He studied English at Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving a BA in 1975 and MLitt in 1979. His thesis was on works by three gay writers: Firbank, Forster and Hartley. He house-shared with future poet laureate Andrew Motion at Oxford, and was awarded poetry's Newdigate Prize, a year before Motion. In the late 1970s he lectured at Magdalen, then at Somerville and Corpus Christi. In 1981 he lectured at UCL, and in 1982 joined The Times Literary Supplement, serving as deputy editor: 1985–90.

Writing

Hollinghurst discussed his early life and literary influences at length in a rare interview at home in London, published in The James White Review in 1997–98.

He won the 2004 Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. His next novel, The Stranger's Child, made the 2011 Booker Prize longlist.

List of works

Poetry

  • Isherwood is at Santa Monica (Sycamore Broadsheet 22: two poems, hand-printed on a single folded sheet), Oxford: Sycamore Press 1975
  • Poetry Introduction 4 (ten poems: "Over the Wall", "Nightfall", "Survey", "Christmas Day at Home", "The Drowned Field", "Alonso", "Isherwood is at Santa Monica", "Ben Dancing at Wayland's Smithy", "Convalescence in Lower Largo", "The Well"), Faber and Faber, 1978 ISBN 978-0571111435
  • Confidential Chats with Boys, Oxford: Sycamore Press 1982 (based on the book Confidential Chats with Boys by William Lee Howard, MD., 1911, Sydney, Australia)
  • "Mud" (London Review of Books, Vol. 4, No. 19, 21 October 1982)

Short stories

  • A Thieving Boy (Firebird 2: Writing Today, Penguin, 1983)
  • Sharps and Flats (Granta 43, 1993), was incorporated into Hollinghurst's second novel, The Folding Star
  • Highlights (Granta 100, 2007)

Novels

Alan Hollinghurst talks about his novel The Stranger's Child on Bookbits radio.

Translations

As editor

Foreword

Awards and honours

Personal life

Hollinghurst is gay and lives in London. Although he now lives with his partner Paul Mendez, Hollinghurst previously said: "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."


This page was last updated at 2023-08-21 01:32 UTC. Update now. View original page.

All our content comes from Wikipedia and under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.


Top

If mathematical, chemical, physical and other formulas are not displayed correctly on this page, please useFirefox or Safari