Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. The Swimming-Pool Library, published in 1988, was one of the first novels to make a frank exploration of British gay life and history. His second novel, The Folding Star, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, and his fourth, The Line of Beauty, won the Prize ten years later, and was adapted as a BBC2 mini-series in 2006. His subsequent novels are The Stranger's Child (2011), The Sparsholt Affair (2017), and Our Evenings, published in 2024 -- all of them examining, among many other things, British queer life and culture over the past century.