03/02/2025
British author Alan Hollinghurst (https://www.instagram.com/p/CstenGNoBs9/?hl=en) said he is “delighted and deeply touched” to be awarded a knighthood in the New Year Honours list for services to literature. The 70-year-old writer earned the Booker Prize with The Line Of Beauty in 2004, the first work of gay fiction to win the prestigious literary award.
His book is about Nick Guest, a young aesthete and Oxford graduate who moves into the London home of his university friend, Toby Fedden, the son of a rising Conservative MP. This brings Nick into a world of privilege, with him meeting Baroness Thatcher at a party while high on co***ne, as it chronicles the spread of Aids and the hero’s sexual conquests.
In 2006, Pride And Prejudice screenwriter Andrew Davies brought the novel to the small screen with a BBC adaptation (https://www.instagram.com/p/CsVxHiJIfyi/?hl=en) starring Downton Abbey actor Dan Stevens as Nick.
He said in a statement to the PA news agency: “I’m delighted and deeply touched to be given this quite unexpected honour for doing something I have always loved doing: making up stories about the world I’ve inherited and tried to play my part in.
(Text https://www.aol.co.uk/entertainment/line-beauty-author-alan-hollinghurst-223000198.html)
