Alan Hollinghurst has been awarded the 2025 David Cohen prize for literature, one of the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious literary honours, in recognition of his lifetime’s achievement in fiction.

The prize, worth £40,000, was announced on Tuesday evening in London by the chair of judges Hermione Lee. She described Hollinghurst as “one of the most daring, stylish, witty, humane and influential novelists writing in the English language today”.

Hollinghurst told the Guardian he was “overcome with emotion” on hearing of his win. “It has always, to my mind, been the most significant British literary prize.” The award, often described as the UK and Ireland’s Nobel in literature, is awarded biennially to a writer from either country for their entire body of work.

“It takes account of everything a writer has done, and the writers it has rewarded in the past have been huge inspirations,” he said. “I went nearly 30 years ago to the ceremony to see Muriel Spark receiving the award, and later Harold Pinter – these figures are godlike to me, and it’s extraordinary now to find myself joining that list.” Winning “feels to me like the greatest encouragement to keep going,” he added.

Hollinghurst, 71, is best known for his Booker prize-winning 2004 novel The Line of Beauty, a social and sexual panorama of Thatcher-era London that has been adapted into a stage production which opened last month at London’s Almeida theatre. His other works include The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1994), The Stranger’s Child (2011) and Our Evenings (2024). He was knighted for services to literature earlier this year.

Lee praised Hollinghurst’s “pioneering boldness and candour” in writing about gay lives and English identity over nearly four decades.

“In seven remarkable novels,” she said, “he has written about society, class and race, biography and memory, art and literature, childhood, love and friendship. He’s equally brilliant at creating gripping plots full of suspense, secrets and mysteries, and at moving personal stories of longing, joy, obsession and loss.”

Lee was joined on the judging panel by the novelist Tessa Hadley, poet Seán Hewitt, critic Maya Jaggi and biographer Ruth Scurr. Hadley said Hollinghurst “makes the reader see some solid thing – a room, a face, a landscape – with thrilling exactness”, while Hewitt praised his “vivid, elegant novels of gay English life that have changed the way we see ourselves”.

“From the start, I set out to write about gay life in England,” said Hollinghurst. “I just felt very lucky, in the 1980s, to have this whole fascinating field of social history and behaviour to explore in fiction, because it hadn’t really been done in this country before.”

His most recent novel, Our Evenings, was praised for its portrayal of a mixed-race narrator in contemporary Britain, a perspective Hollinghurst said he approached with care.

“It gave me pause,” he said. “I’d been wanting to write about racial discrimination for some time, but it was a question of how to look at it and find a way that was tactful and true.”

He added that he is working on a new novel, though he is “at a very early stage. I’ve always been horribly slow with formulation – about every seven years I produce something.”

As part of the David Cohen tradition, the winner also selects the recipient of the Clarissa Luard award, a £10,000 prize for emerging talent the winner wishes to support. Hollinghurst chose the Congolese-British playwright Benedict Lombe, whose play Shifters moved from the Bush theatre to the West End this year, earning her two Olivier nominations.

“Shifters was the best new play that I saw last year,” Hollinghurst said. “I saw it at the Bush theatre before it transferred, it was so remarkable. I long for her next play, and I thought she was an obvious person to give this award and encouragement to.”

“It’s an honour and a joy to have my work recognised and championed by such an accomplished – and exquisite – storyteller as Alan,” said Lombe. “At a time when many voices are being silenced and funding is being cut, this award is a precious thing indeed.”

First presented in 1993 and named after its founder, the David Cohen prize celebrates writers whose work has made a lasting contribution to British and Irish literature. Previous winners include Seamus Heaney, Hilary Mantel and Colm Tóibín.