London: Alan Hollinghurst's explicitly gay novel 'The Line of Beauty', a satire on Britain under Margaret Thatcher, has won the 50,000-pound Booker Prize, the prestigious international literary award.

50-year-old Hollinghurst, a poet as well as an author who was born in Gloucestershire and lives in London, was singled out for his fourth novel - The Line of Beauty.

The judges, chaired by Chris Smith, former Labour Culture Secretary and Britain's first openly gay Cabinet Minister, were strongly divided and took more than two hours to decide on a winner last night (Oct 19, 2004).

'Cloud Atlas' by David Mitchell had been the hot favourite with the bookmakers. Mitchell, 35, has been hailed as the finest young English author to emerge since Martin Amis. The Line of Beauty, which tells the story of an ambitious new Tory MP, has been hailed as a subtle tragicomedy of manners and mores, although its author wants readers to make their own decisions and work out their own feelings through his books.

"It was an incredibly difficult decision, resulting in a winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite 1980s. The search for love, sex and beauty is rarely this exquisitely done," Smith said.

Accepting the Man booker Prize, Hollinghurst said last night, "It's very amazing to me that the long, solitary process of writing a novel should lead to a moment like this."