Alan Hollinghurst

A bank manager's son from Gloucestershire, Hollinghurst wrote an Oxford thesis on concealment in gay novelists (Firbank and Forster among them), then spent more than a decade on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement while composing his debut in the early mornings.

The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) rendered pre-AIDS gay London with scholarly polish and total frankness, announcing style itself as his politics; The Folding Star and The Spell followed at his famously unhurried pace.

The Line of Beauty (2004), Nick Guest, lodger and connoisseur of the ogee curve, adrift in the Feddens' Notting Hill household from 1983 to 1987, won the Booker; The Stranger's Child and The Sparsholt Affair extended the method across the century. A novel every six or seven years, each sentence load-bearing.