A knighthood, a lifetime achievement award and a hit theatre production of The Line of Beauty… the author on a year of personal success and political change
I
f there can be a downside to receiving a lifetime achievement award, it can surely only be the hint of closure it evokes. I put this as tactfully as I can to Alan Hollinghurst, this year’s winner of the David Cohen prize, which has previously recognised the contribution to literature of, among others, VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien. It does have “a certain hint of the obituary about it”, he concedes, laughing. “So I’m very much doing what I can to take it as an incentive rather than a reward.”
But there have been plenty of rewards recently. Hollinghurst was knighted in this year’s New Year honours list, a couple of months after the publication of his novel Our Evenings, the story of actor Dave Win’s journey from boarding school to the end of his life, which received rave reviews. In the Guardian, critic Alexandra Harris announced it his finest novel to date, noting that it “forms a deep pattern of connection with its predecessors, while being an entirely distinct and brimming whole”.
One of those predecessors is The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker prize in 2004 and was shortly afterwards adapted for television, providing an early leading role for actor Dan Stevens. This autumn, Hollinghurst’s tour d’horizon of the Thatcher era as seen through the eyes of Nick Guest, a young man taken up by a wealthy and politically powerful family, also became a stage play at London’s Almeida theatre in a version by Jack Holden, directed by Michael Grandage. It has been one of the season’s hottest tickets, I remark: “absolutely scorching”, replies Hollinghurst, who is witty and charmingly self-deprecating in conversation, and yet never less than attentive and serious.
