Alan Hollinghurst has won the David Cohen Prize, given every two years to “a living writer from the U.K. or Republic of Ireland for a lifetime’s achievement in literature.”
Hollinghurst, a native of Stroud, England, made his fiction debut in 1988 with The Swimming-Pool Library, which won the Somerset Maugham Award. He went on to publish the novels The Folding Star, The Spell, The Stranger’s Child, The Sparsholt Affair, and, most recently, Our Evenings. His 2004 novel, The Line of Beauty, won the Booker Prize and is widely considered one of the most significant novels of the 21st century.
Hermione Lee, the chair of judges for the award, said, “In seven remarkable novels, he has written about society, class and race, biography and memory, art and literature, childhood, love and friendship. He’s equally brilliant at creating gripping plots full of suspense, secrets and mysteries, and at moving personal stories of longing, joy, obsession and loss.”
Hollinghurst told the Guardian, “It takes account of everything a writer has done, and the writers it has rewarded in the past have been huge inspirations. I went nearly 30 years ago to the ceremony to see Muriel Spark receiving the award, and later Harold Pinter—these figures are godlike to me, and it’s extraordinary now to find myself joining that list.”
The David Cohen Prize, administered by the British literary charity New Writing North, was established in 1993. Other previous winners include V. S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, Julian Barnes, and Edna O’Brien.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
