Alan Hollinghurst: 2025

“I feel very happy, and deeply honoured, to be awarded The David Cohen Prize. It has always, to my mind, been the most significant British literary prize, because it takes account of everything a writer has done, and the writers it has rewarded in the past have been the giants, the exemplars of my own writing life. It’s extraordinary now to find myself joining that list, and to know that what I’ve done has been so well thought of; it feels to me too like the greatest encouragement to keep going.”

Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. He was educated at Canford School, Dorset, and Magdalen College, Oxford. From 1982 to 1995 he was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement.

He is the author of seven novels: The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award and of the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; The Folding Star (1994), shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction; The Spell (1998); The Line of Beauty (2004), winner of the Man Booker Prize; The Stranger’s Child (2011), National Book Awards UK Author of the Year; The Sparsholt Affair (2017); and Our Evenings (2024). He has translated two plays of Jean Racine, Bajazet (Almeida Theatre, 1990) and Bérénice (Donmar Warehouse, 2012).

He was elected FRSL in 1995, Honorary D. Litt (University College London) in 2012, and has been an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford since 2013. He was knighted for services to literature in 2025.