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Julian Barnes
Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (having married Pat Kavanagh). In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories, as well as two memoirs and a nonfiction book, The Man in the Red Coat, about people of Belle Époque Paris in the arts.
In 2004, he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize.
Barnes was born in Leicester, in the East Midlands of England, on 19 January 1946, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards. Both of his parents were French teachers. He has said that his support for Leicester City Football Club was, aged four or five, "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city. At the age of 10, Barnes was told by his mother that he had "too much imagination".
In 1956, the family moved to Northwood, Middlesex, the 'Metro-land' of his first novel. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964. He then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied modern languages. After graduation, he worked for three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement. He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, about which he has said: "When there were weekly meetings I would be paralysed into silence, and was thought of as the mute member of staff." From 1979 to 1986, he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for The Observer.
His first novel, Metroland, published in 1980, is the story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels to Paris, France, as a student, finally returning to London. The novel deals with themes of idealism and sexual fidelity, and has the three-part structure that is a common recurrence in Barnes's work. After reading the novel, Barnes's mother complained about the book's "bombardment" of filth.
His second novel, Before She Met Me (1982), features a darker narrative, a story of revenge by a jealous historian who becomes obsessed with his second wife's past. Barnes's breakthrough novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), departed from the traditional linear structure of his previous novels and featured a fragmentary biographical-style story of an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who focuses obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert. About Flaubert, Barnes has said, "he's the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh, who I think has spoken the most truth about writing." Flaubert's Parrot was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and it helped establish Barnes as a serious literary figure when the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
In 1986, Barnes published Staring at the Sun, a novel about a woman growing to maturity in postwar England and dealing with issues of love, truth, and mortality. In 1989, Barnes published A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a nonlinear novel that uses a variety of writing styles to call into question perceived notions of human history and knowledge itself.
During the 1980s, Barnes wrote four crime novels under the name "Dan Kavanagh" (Barnes had recently married the literary agent Pat Kavanagh). The novels centred around the main character Duffy, a former police detective turned security advisor. Duffy is notable because he represents one of Britain's first bisexual male detectives. Barnes has said the use of a pseudonym is "liberating in that you could indulge any fantasies of violence you might have". While Metroland, also published in 1980, took Barnes eight years to write, Duffy and the rest of the Kavanagh novels typically took less than two weeks each to put to paper—an experiment to test "what it would be like writing as fast as I possibly could in a concentrated way".
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Julian Barnes
Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (having married Pat Kavanagh). In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories, as well as two memoirs and a nonfiction book, The Man in the Red Coat, about people of Belle Époque Paris in the arts.
In 2004, he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize.
Barnes was born in Leicester, in the East Midlands of England, on 19 January 1946, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards. Both of his parents were French teachers. He has said that his support for Leicester City Football Club was, aged four or five, "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city. At the age of 10, Barnes was told by his mother that he had "too much imagination".
In 1956, the family moved to Northwood, Middlesex, the 'Metro-land' of his first novel. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964. He then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied modern languages. After graduation, he worked for three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement. He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, about which he has said: "When there were weekly meetings I would be paralysed into silence, and was thought of as the mute member of staff." From 1979 to 1986, he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for The Observer.
His first novel, Metroland, published in 1980, is the story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels to Paris, France, as a student, finally returning to London. The novel deals with themes of idealism and sexual fidelity, and has the three-part structure that is a common recurrence in Barnes's work. After reading the novel, Barnes's mother complained about the book's "bombardment" of filth.
His second novel, Before She Met Me (1982), features a darker narrative, a story of revenge by a jealous historian who becomes obsessed with his second wife's past. Barnes's breakthrough novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), departed from the traditional linear structure of his previous novels and featured a fragmentary biographical-style story of an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who focuses obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert. About Flaubert, Barnes has said, "he's the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh, who I think has spoken the most truth about writing." Flaubert's Parrot was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and it helped establish Barnes as a serious literary figure when the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
In 1986, Barnes published Staring at the Sun, a novel about a woman growing to maturity in postwar England and dealing with issues of love, truth, and mortality. In 1989, Barnes published A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a nonlinear novel that uses a variety of writing styles to call into question perceived notions of human history and knowledge itself.
During the 1980s, Barnes wrote four crime novels under the name "Dan Kavanagh" (Barnes had recently married the literary agent Pat Kavanagh). The novels centred around the main character Duffy, a former police detective turned security advisor. Duffy is notable because he represents one of Britain's first bisexual male detectives. Barnes has said the use of a pseudonym is "liberating in that you could indulge any fantasies of violence you might have". While Metroland, also published in 1980, took Barnes eight years to write, Duffy and the rest of the Kavanagh novels typically took less than two weeks each to put to paper—an experiment to test "what it would be like writing as fast as I possibly could in a concentrated way".