Novel Partially Written at Yaddo Wins Booker Prize

Alan Hollinghurst

Book: The Line Of Beauty

(October 20, 2004) - Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, a novel he largely finished at Yaddo, is the winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, it was announced Tuesday in London.

Critics have lavished praise on The Line of Beauty, calling it a “masterpiece” and “brilliantly written.” It is Mr. Hollinghurst’s fourth novel, and he has said it was his most challenging project to date, labeling it a summation of and development from all of his previous fiction. The Line of Beauty is the story of an innocent young gay man (a Henry James scholar) who gets caught up in the confusing world of 1980s British politics when he moves into the attic room of a prominent family and finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession with beauty, a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends.

The Booker Prize, Britain’s premier fiction award, is given every year to a novel by a writer from Britain, the Republic of Ireland, or one of the Commonwealth countries, including Australia, Canada, and India. The award includes a cash prize of approximately $80,000 and almost certainly guarantees an increase in sales for the book and worldwide recognition for Mr. Hollinghurst. Judges initially read 132 novels to name six finalists.

Mr. Hollinghurst, who has twice been a guest at Yaddo, held the Eli Cantor Residency for Writers when he was at Yaddo in 2002. He studied and then taught English at Oxford and was for several years deputy editor of The London Times Literary Supplement. His previous novels are The Swimming-Pool Library (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Folding Star (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), and The Spell. Mr. Hollinghurst, 50, was one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 1993. He lives in London.

A book by another Yaddo writer, The Master by Colm Toíbín, was among those shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Other shortlisted titles for the 2004 award included Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor, The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and I’ll Go to Bed at Noon by Gerard Woodward. The winner and each of the shortlisted finalists receive a designer-bound edition of their book, and the remaining five authors receive a cash prize of about $4,000.