Hollinghurst wins Booker for gay tale

British author Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize, one of the world's most important literary awards, for the tale of a gay hedonist living in Margaret Thatcher's Britain of the 1980s - The Line of Beauty.

Fellow British writer David Mitchell had been the hottest favourite in the history of the Booker to land the prize for his complex time machine novel Cloud Atlas.

But the judges decided after more than two hours of heated debate to opt for Hollinghurst, the second favourite.