Born May 26: Alan Hollinghurst

Here are the five essential things to know about Alan Hollinghurst, 60 today and still the only openly gay man to win the Booker Prize: 1. his first novel The Swimming-Pool Library (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), 2. his second novel The Folding Star (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), 3. his third novel The Spell, 4. his fourth novel The Line of Beauty (winner of the Man Booker Prize), and 5) his fifth novel The Stranger's Child (finalist for the Walter Scott Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker). Read them all. When he made his debut with The Swimming-Pool Library, Edmund White called it, "the best book on gay life yet written by an English author." Hollinghurst has only gotten better with time, though you should put The Spell last on your list. As one of the ten queer curators of London's Gay Icons show, his six selections included Ronald Firbank, Joe Dallesandro, Thom Gunn, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.