Barnes, Julian (1946-…), is an English author who has won praise for his novels and essays. Barnes is known for his wit and elegant style and the way he blends fiction, nonfiction, and commentary in many of his works. Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending won the Man Booker Prize in 2011. The award, now called the Booker Prize, is the United Kingdom’s most important literary award. Three other Barnes novels have been nominated for the award: Flaubert’s Parrot in 1984; England, England in 1998; and Arthur & George in 2005.
Barnes first gained fame for Flaubert’s Parrot, which reflects the author’s interest in French culture and literature, an interest he inherited from his parents, both of whom taught French. England, England is a satire on modern English society. Arthur & George is based on a true story of an English man with an Indian father falsely accused of a crime in 1903. A leading character is the British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Sense of an Ending portrays a middle-aged man forced to look back on his student days.
Barnes’s first novel was Metroland (1980), about a young man who lives for a time in Paris and his return to England. His other novels include Staring at the Sun (1986); A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989); Talking It Over (1991) and its sequel, Love, etc. (2000); The Porcupine (1992); The Noise of Time (2016); The Only Story (2018); and Elizabeth Finch (2022). He also wrote four detective novels under the name Dan Kavanagh.
Barnes’s short stories were collected in Cross Channel (1996), The Lemon Table (2004), and Pulse (2011). His essays were published in Letters from London (1995), Something to Declare (2002), and Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (2015). In the Land of Pain (2002) is Barnes’s translation of a notebook by Alphonse Daudet, a French author who lived during the 1800’s. The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003) collects Barnes’s writings about food. Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) combines a memoir with Barnes’s reflections on death. Levels of Life (2013) is a collection of three essays inspired by the death of the author’s wife. In The Man in the Red Coat (2019), Barnes combines a history of art and attitudes in French and British society in the late 1800’s with the biography of a dashing French physician of the time.
Julian Patrick Barnes was born on Jan. 19, 1946, in Leicester. He graduated with honors from Magdalen College at the University of Oxford in 1968. Barnes was a lexicographer (dictionary writer) for the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement from 1969 to 1972. He later worked as a newspaper literary editor and television critic. He served as the London correspondent for The New Yorker magazine from 1990 to 1995.
