English writer Alan Hollinghurst was BOTD in 1954. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire to a middle-class family, he attended a private school in Dorset. He studied English at Oxford University, writing his master’s thesis on sexual repression in the novels of gay writers Ronald Firbank, E. M. Forster and L. P. Hartley. After graduating, he moved to London, sharing a flat with poet Andrew Motion and working for the Times Literary Supplement. His 1989 debut novel The Swimming Pool Library created a literary sensation with its steamy blend of Oxbridge snobbery and explicit gay sex. Published in the middle of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the novel’s explicit and unapologetic depictions of promiscuous and “irresponsible” gay desire made Hollinghurst an unlikely cult figure. His second novel The Folding Star, a modern-day retelling of Thomas Mann‘s novella Death in Venice, was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. Despite being the year’s favourite, he lost the prize, reputedly due to the judges’ discomfort about his depiction of a man’s desire for a teenage boy. He won the Booker in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, a witty and poignant satire of 1980s Thatcherite Britain, loosely based on Evelyn Waugh‘s Brideshead Revisited. A critical and commercial success, it was successfully filmed for television. His 1996 novel The Spell followed an inter-generational quartet of characters through the drug-infused buzz of London’s clubbing scene. In The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair, he examined the erasure of historical gay narratives and his ambivalence about the increasing respectability of contemporary gay culture. His most recent novel, Our Evenings, about a mixed-race gay man navigating racism and homophobia in late-20th century London, was published in 2024. Hollinghurst lives in London with his partner, the writer Paul Mendez, who is 28 years his junior.