Barry Unsworth FRSL (10 August 19304 June 2012) was an English writer known for his historical fiction. He published 17 novels, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger.

Biography

Unsworth was born on 10 August 1930 in Wingate, a mining village in County Durham, England, to a family of miners. He was 81. Unsworth died the same day as Ray Bradbury; as Cynthia Crossen said in the Wall Street Journal, "Mr. Bradbury invented the future; Mr. Unsworth invented the past."

Work

Unsworth's first novel, The Partnership, was published in 1966 when he was 36. "...in my earlier novels, especially the two written in the early '70s, The Hide and Mooncranker's Gift, there was a baroque quality in the style, a density. The mood was grim, but the language was more figurative and more high-spirited. There was more delight in it, more self-indulgence, too. Among my earliest influences as a writer were the American novelists of the deep south, especially Eudora Welty, and some of that elated, grotesque comedy stayed with me." Mooncranker's Gift (1973) won the Heinemann Award. Other novels included Stone Virgin (1985) and Losing Nelson (1999). In addition to Eudora Welty, he counted William Faulkner and Carson McCullers as his major influences.

Unsworth did not start to write historical fiction until his sixth novel, Pascali's Island (1980), the first of his novels to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Pascali's Island is set on an unnamed Aegean island during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Reflecting on this shift, Unsworth explained: "Nowadays I go to Britain relatively rarely and for short periods; in effect, I have become an expatriate. The result has been a certain loss of interest in British life and society and a very definite loss of confidence in my ability to register the contemporary scene there – the kind of things people say, the styles of dress, the politics etc.– with sufficient subtlety and accuracy. So I have turned to the past. The great advantage of this, for a writer of my temperament at least, is that one is freed from a great deal of surface clutter. One is enabled to take a remote period and use it as a distant mirror (to borrow Barbara Tuchman’s phrase), and so try to say things about our human condition – then and now – which transcend the particular period and become timeless." A film version directed by James Dearden, starring Charles Dance, Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley, as the title character, was released in 1988.

Morality Play, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995, is a murder mystery set in 14th century England about a travelling troupe of players that put on Bible plays.

Some critics have attacked historical fiction as being un-literary, for example James Wood writing in The New Yorker called it a "somewhat

genre not exactly jammed with greatness."

  • 1980 Booker Prize, shortlist, Pascali's Island
  • 1992 Booker Prize, co-winner, Sacred Hunger
  • 1995 Booker Prize, shortlist, Morality Play
  • 2006 Booker Prize, longlist, The Ruby in Her Navel
  • 2012 Walter Scott Prize, shortlist, The Quality of Mercy

List of works

;Novels

  • The Partnership (1966)
  • The Greeks Have a Word For It (1967)
  • The Hide (1970)
  • Mooncranker's Gift (1973)
  • The Big Day (1976)
  • Pascali's Island (1980) (US edition first published as The Idol Hunter)
  • The Rage of the Vulture (1982)
  • Stone Virgin (1985)
  • Sugar and Rum (1988)
  • Sacred Hunger (1992)
  • Morality Play (1995)
  • After Hannibal (1996)
  • Losing Nelson (1999)
  • The Songs of the Kings (2002)
  • The Ruby in Her Navel (2006)
  • Land of Marvels (2009)
  • The Quality of Mercy (2011)

;Nonfiction

  • Crete (2004)

References

  • Audio recordings from Key West Literary Seminar, 2009: Unsworth reading from Land of Marvels | 'The Economy of Truth' (lecture) | 'Why Bother with the Past?' (lecture)
  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20090830180523/http://www.victorialautman.com/interviews/barry-unsworth.shtml] Land of Marvels broadcast interview on WFMT Radio