On #TakeBackPride day 18 we're highlighting English writer Alan Hollinghurst. Hollinghurst is a gay man and award-winning author of six novels and two translations. He is uniquely situated in the world of gay literature as both a pre and post-AIDS writer.
His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, was written before the AIDS crisis but published just as the pandemic reached Britain in 1984. It is dedicated to his friend who, apparently, was the first gay man to be diagnosed with AIDS in the UK.
In 2004 he won the Man Booker Prize for his acclaimed novel The Line of Beauty which focuses on the life personal and sexual life of a gay man in his 20s in Thatcher's Britain. Hollinghurst's unflinching focus on gay British life has marked him out as one of the Anglosphere's most eminent and consistent writers, gay or straight.
