Skip to main content

The Man Booker Prize 2004

Alan Hollinghurst, 2004
Winner
Shortlist
Longlist

The media reception of Alan Hollinghurst’s win did The Line of Beauty a great disservice. There was far more to the book than it simply being ‘the first gay novel’ to win the prize.

Previous Booker Prize winners such as William Golding’s Rites of Passage and Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road had included sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality, but Hollinghurst’s stylish tale put gayness front and centre.

Although the sex and snorting of its earlier companion piece The Swimming-Pool Library are present and correct, the novel is as much about the febrile atmosphere of the 1980s, with the travails of its hero, Nick Guest, set in the age of Mrs Thatcher, Aids and class privilege. 
 

The Line of Beauty
The Line of Beauty

The Line of Beauty

Winner of The Booker Prize 2004

Published by
Picador
Alan Hollinghurst portrays a ruthless decade through Nick, an increasingly-less-innocent abroad, as he gets caught up in the boom years of the 80s

The shortlist

Bitter Fruit
Relationships fracture under the weight of history, in Achmat Dangor’s searing novel about a brittle family in a dysfunctional society
The Electric Michaelangelo
Through her vivid depiction of two very different seaside cultures, Sarah Hall chronicles the remarkable life and times of a misfit tattoo artist
The Line of Beauty
Prize winner
Alan Hollinghurst portrays a ruthless decade through Nick, an increasingly-less-innocent abroad, as he gets caught up in the boom years of the 80s
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us
The Master
Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts led to triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing
I'll Go to Bed at Noon
Gerard Woodward’s richly woven novel, set in the 70s. As pressure builds on Colette to help her struggling family, her own weaknesses begin to emerge

The longlist

The 2004 judges