Fridae

British author Alan Hollinghurst on Tuesday won the prestigious international literary award, the Booker Prize, for his explicitly gay novel The Line of Beauty.

Organisers have confirmed this is the first time in the 36-year history of the Booker that a gay novel has won the prize. This also marks the second time 50-year-old Hollinghurst had been shortlisted for the Booker.

"It's very amazing to me that the long, solitary process of writing a novel should lead to a moment like this," Hollinghurst said in accepting the award in London.

The novel tells the tale of Nick Guest, a young man who explores a world of cocaine, gay cruising and the self-confidence of wealth, set against a background of social problems, including AIDS.

Set in Margaret Thatcher's Britain of the 1980s, the young Oxford University graduate has a passionate affair with a black council worker before falling in love with a cocaine-addicted millionaire.

The book's most memorable scene is said to be the protagonist dancing with Thatcher at a party while he is drugged up the eyeballs.

"It was such a ghastly period to live through," Hollinghurst told the British Broadcasting Corp., which carried the awards ceremony.

"We're very much living with the consequences of what happened in the Thatcher years now."

Hollinghurst won this year's �50,000 award for the best novel of the last 12 months by a British, Irish or Commonwealth writer. He narrowly beat fellow Briton David Mitchell who had been favoured to win for Cloud Atlas, a complex time machine novel.

His first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988) was selected as the 34th greatest gay and lesbian novel of all time by judges for the Publishing Triangle in 1999 while his other novels were The Folding Star, in 1994, which was shortlisted for the Booker, and The Spell in 1998.

Chris Smith, the panel chairman and former culture secretary, said during an award ceremony in London that it "was an incredibly difficult" decision that split the panel.

Smith who is also Britain's first openly gay cabinet minister, added that the panel's decision "resulted in a winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets under the skin of the Thatcherite Eighties."

"The search for love, sex and beauty is rarely this exquisitely done," he said of the novel.