Alan Hollinghurst

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Alan Hollinghurst 2011

Alan James Hollinghurst (born May 26, 1954 in Stroud , Gloucestershire , England ) is a British writer .

life and work

Hollinghurst was the only child of James Hollinghurst, a banker who served in the Royal Air Force during World War II , and his wife, Elizabeth. He studied English at Magdalen College , Oxford . Here he graduated in 1979 with a scientific thesis on the writers Ronald Firbank , EM Forster and LP Hartley . He then taught in Oxford at Magdalen College, Somerville College and Corpus Christi College , before becoming a lecturer at University College London from 1981 . Between 1982 and 1995 he wrote reviews for The Times Literary Supplement .

After Hollinghurst had already published a few poems in the mid-1970s and the short story A Thieving Boy in 1983 , he made his debut novel The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988 . Through this and his subsequent novels, he earned a reputation among critics for being one of the best contemporary British writers. At the center of The Swimming Pool Library is the 25-year-old William, a young and handsome homosexual from a wealthy family, who is given the task of writing his memoir by the elderly Lord Nantwich. Lord Nantwich's life story is set in the British colonies and in wartime London, and the criminalization of homosexuality up into the 1960s is also discussed. Hollinghurst received several awards for this novel and was praised for the new, unapologetic-looking way in which he addressed gay life. Edmund White called The Swimming Pool Library “the best gay life novel ever written by an English author”. His second novel The Folding Star (1994), so far the only one of his novels not translated into German, alludes to references to Death in Venice : It is about an English teacher in Flanders who falls in love with one of his students and has the strength and Transience of beauty noticed.

The third novel The Spell from 1998 is about a middle-aged architect who is drawn into the pulsating rave scene and into drug use by his young lover . For his fourth novel The Line of Beauty from 2004 he received excellent international reviews as well as the Booker Prize (as the first book with a largely homosexual theme) . The focus of the novel, which is set in three parts between 1983 and 1987, is Nick Guest , a young doctoral student in literature who lives as a houseguest in the family of a conservative member of parliament during the Thatcher era and observes the social elite there. At the same time he is gaining experience in the London gay scene, which is increasingly plagued by AIDS . The Line of Beauty was filmed in 2006 by the BBC as a three-part TV series with Dan Stevens , Hayley Atwell and Tim McInnerny .

Hollinghurst's fifth novel, The Stranger's Child, from 2011, is set across several generations and is about the life and afterlife of a young poet who died in World War I. The question arises whether his famous love poem is dedicated to his friend George or his younger sister Daphne. His cross-generational moral image novel The Sparsholt Affair (2017) is about the social approach to homosexuality in England from the Second World War to the present. The eponymous protagonists are an athletic rower who was courted by several gays during his time at Oxford University, as well as his son, who lives openly as gay. The eponymous Sparsholt affair , which includes the older Sparsholt, homosexual acts and a prison sentence, is not described directly, but rather has to be pinned together by the reader using clues . The FAZ reviewer still says that you will be well entertained.

Hollinghurst now lives in the London borough of Hampstead . He is a member of the Royal Society of Literature .

Themes and style

Hollinghurst's works are largely set in the British upper class among intellectual, cultured characters, who at the same time reveal human weaknesses and abysses. Similar to Henry James , one of his great role models, he has a "perfect sense of social origin, class differences and questions of power". In many of his social novels, he chronologizes homosexual life with its changes over the course of the 20th century.

Hollinghurst is considered by many critics to be one of the most stylistically outstanding writers of contemporary literature in the English-speaking world. He publishes a novel about every six years, and according to his own statements, his writing workload is usually between 300 and 400 words per day.

Awards

As a student at Oxford University, Hollinghurst received the 1974 Newdigate Prize , an award for the best poem by an Oxford student. In 1989 he received the Somerset Maugham Award , the Gay and Lesbian Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for The Swimming-Pool Library . For The Folding Star he received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1994 and again the Lambda Literary Award in 1995. In 2004 he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel The Line of Beauty . Also, The Folding Star and The Stranger's Child were nominated for the Booker Prize. In 2011 Hollinghurst received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the LGTB literary organization Publishing Triangle . In 2015, The Line of Beauty was selected as one of the most important literary works of this century to date in the BBC's selection of the best 20 novels from 2000 to 2014 .

Works

  • Confidential Chats With Boys . Sycamore Press, Oxford 1982. (some poems in the volume)
  • The Swimming-Pool Library . Chatto & Windus, London 1988, ISBN 0-7011-3282-5 .
  • The Folding Star . Chatto & Windus, London 1994, ISBN 0-7011-5913-8 .
  • The Spell . Chatto & Windus, London 1998, ISBN 0-7011-6519-7 .
    • German edition: The Enchanted . Translated by Eike Schönfeld. Blessing Verlag, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-89667-086-7 .
  • The Line of Beauty . Picador, London 2004, ISBN 0-330-48320-X .
    • German edition: The beauty line . Translated by Thomas Stegers. Blessing Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-89667-282-7 .
  • The Stranger's Child . Picador, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-330-48324-7 .
    • German edition: The stranger's child . Translated by Thomas Stegers. Blessing Verlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-89667-468-5 .
  • The Sparsholt Affair . Picador, London 2017
    • German edition: The Sparsholt Affair . From the English by Thomas Stegers, Blessing Verlag, Munich 2019, 544 pages, ISBN 978-3-89667-626-9 .

literature

  • Allan Johnson: Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence. London, 2014, Macmillan.
  • Mark Mathuray (Ed.): Sex and Sensibility in the Novels of Alan Hollinghurst. London, 2017, Macmillan.

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ^ The Hollinghurst line. May 14, 2005, accessed June 20, 2019 .
  2. ^ Alan Hollinghurst - Literature. Retrieved June 20, 2019 .
  3. ^ Alan Hollinghurst - Literature. Retrieved June 27, 2019 .
  4. ↑ John Lanchester: Catch 28 . In: London Review of Books . March 3, 1988, ISSN  0260-9592 , p. 11-12 ( lrb.co.uk [accessed June 20, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Emily Bearn: Most of all, I like bad behavior . October 25, 2004, ISSN  0307-1235 ( telegraph.co.uk [accessed June 20, 2019]).
  6. ↑ Subscribe to read. Retrieved June 27, 2019 (UK English).
  7. ↑ Oh, that back curve. October 19, 2005, accessed June 27, 2019 .
  8. ↑ It is art that defines life . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed June 27, 2019]).
  9. ^ The Line of Beauty at the Internet Movie Database. Retrieved July 7, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Subscribe to read. Retrieved June 27, 2019 (UK English).
  11. ↑ Evi Simeoni: novel by Alan Hollinghurst: Sounds a bit like the irony of desperation , review in the FAZ on May 31, 2019, accessed June 1, 2019
  12. ↑ Maike Albath : Alan Hollinghurst: "The Sparsholt Affair" From the Power of Sexuality , review in Deutschlandfunk Kultur on March 25, 2019, accessed June 1, 2019
  13. ↑ Subscribe to read. Retrieved June 27, 2019 (UK English).
  14. ↑ Alan Hollinghurst: "The Sparsholt Affair" - On the power of sexuality. Accessed June 27, 2019 (German).
  15. ↑ Gustav Seibt: What we experienced . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2019, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed June 27, 2019]).
  16. ↑ Alex Preston: The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst - the work of a master . In: The Guardian . September 25, 2017, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed June 27, 2019]).
  17. ↑ Laura Miller: Alan Hollinghurst Hates Similes. March 26, 2018, accessed June 27, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Emily Bearn: Most of all, I like bad behavior . October 25, 2004, ISSN  0307-1235 ( telegraph.co.uk [accessed June 20, 2019]).
personal data
SURNAME Hollinghurst, Alan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hollinghurst, Alan James (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 26, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Stroud , Gloucestershire , England