Julian Barnes - WikiHQ

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English essayist, novelist and short story writer.

After completing his education, Barnes spent three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement. His first work of fiction – Metroland – was published in 1980, with his second – Before She Met Me – following two years later. Flaubert's Parrot was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, was a finalist for the 1988 Grinzane Cavour Prize, and won both the 1985 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the 1986 Prix Médicis Essai. Barnes published Staring at the Sun and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters later the same decade.

Talking It Over – published in 1991 – won the 1992 Prix Femina étranger, and was followed nine years later by a sequel titled Love, etc, in between which the short story collection Cross Channel and two longer works – The Porcupine and England, England – appeared. Arthur & George was shortlisted for both the 2005 Booker Prize and 2007 Dublin Literary Award, while The Sense of an Ending won the former prize in 2011. Two further short story collections – The Lemon Table and Pulse – were published in 2004 and 2011 respectively.

Among Barnes's later works of fiction were The Noise of Time, The Only Story and Elizabeth Finch. To coincide with his 80th birthday in January 2026 he published Departure(s), saying it would be his last book. Alongside his fictional work – he wrote four works of crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh – he has published several essay collections, as well as two memoirs and the nonfiction book, The Man in the Red Coat – about people of Belle Époque Paris in the arts. He also translated In the Land of Pain from French into English.

Appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004, his other honours include the 1986 E. M. Forster Award, the 1993 Shakespeare Prize, the 2004 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2016 Siegfried Lenz Prize and the 2021 Jerusalem Prize. He has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Early life

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 their parents were French teachers. At the age of 10, Barnes's mother told her son he had "too much imagination".

Writing

Barnes works – among his books and papers – on an IBM 196c electric typewriter in a study containing a large desk with three sides. 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 helped to establish Barnes as a serious literary figure; the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was a finalist for the 1988 Grinzane Cavour Prize, and won both the 1985 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the 1986 Prix Médicis Essai. His publisher would later gift him one of Gustave Flaubert's original letters when Barnes surpassed paperback sales of one million of all his works.

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, he published A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a nonlinear novel using a variety of writing styles to call into question perceived notions of human history and knowledge itself. Between the two there was The Porcupine – a novel published in 1992 – which again deals with a historical theme, this time depicting the trial of Stoyo Petkanov – the former leader of a collapsed Communist country in Eastern Europe – as he stands trial for crimes against his country. Barnes – a keen Francophile – also published Cross Channel, a collection of 10 stories charting Britain's relationship with France.

In 2003, Barnes undertook a rare acting role as the voice of Georges Simenon in a BBC Radio 4 series of adaptations of Inspector Maigret stories. Arthur & George (2005) – a fictional account of a true crime that was investigated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – made the 2007 Dublin Literary Award shortlist.

Later years: 2011–

Barnes's 11th novel, The Sense of an Ending, was published by Jonathan Cape on 4 August 2011. In October of that year, it was awarded the Booker Prize. The judges took 31 minutes to come to their decision, with head judge – Stella Rimington – saying it was a "beautifully written book" and that the panel thought it "spoke to humankind in the 21st Century." Though Barnes was present at the ceremony, he had stayed away from publicity surrounding the prize, which The Daily Telegraph attributed to his previous comment that "The only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo. It drives publishers mad with hope, booksellers mad with greed, judges mad with power, winners mad with pride, and losers (the unsuccessful short-listees plus every other novelist in the country) mad with envy and disappointment".

right|thumb

In 2013, Barnes published Levels of Life. Divided into three sections, the first section of the work gives a history of early ballooning and aerial photography, describing the work of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. The second part is a short story about Fred Burnaby and the French actor Sarah Bernhardt, both also balloonists. The third part is an essay discussing Barnes's grief over the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh (although she is not named): "You put together two people who have not been put together before . . . Sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed . . . I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart." Blake Morrison, writing in The Guardian, said of the third section: "Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief."

The Noise of Time, a historical novel published in 2016, features a fictionalised version of composer Dmitry Shostakovich. Elizabeth Finch, published in 2022, has as its title character a woman who is pursued by the newspapers after an LRB lecture. The set-up of British tabloid interest in academia was thought implausible by some reviewers; Barnes, however, noted what he described as the "disgusting" treatment of historical novelist Hilary Mantel when she spoke about the state of the British royal family at the British Museum in 2013 and then wrote about it for the London Review of Books. Barnes said the outline of Finch's experience had come "virtually word for word, picture for picture" from the Daily Mails coverage.

In 2025, Barnes published the essays entitled Changing My Mind, in which he questions whether it is possible for the Self to change the mind, stating instead that it is the mind that changes our identity, the Self being inside the mind and not something separate from it. Furthermore, these essays contain reflections on memory, in which, developing what his brother had suggested to him – namely that memory is "an act of the imagination" – Barnes argues that "sometimes we remember as true things that never even happened in the first place; that we may grossly embellish an original incident out of all recognition; that we may cannibalise someone else's memory, and change not just the endings of the stories of our lives, but also their middles and beginnings. I think that memory, over time, changes, and, indeed, changes our mind".

On 20 January 2026 – the day after Barnes's 80th birthday – Departure(s) went on sale in the UK, with Barnes declaring it as his final book to be published.

Awards and honours

1981: Somerset Maugham Award, winner, Metroland (jointly with Clive Sinclair's Hearts of Gold and A. N. Wilson's The Healing Art)
1985: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize winner, Flaubert's Parrot
1986: E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
1986: Prix Médicis Essai, winner, Flaubert's Parrot
1988: Gutenberg Prize
1993: Shakespeare Prize, Alfred Toepfer Foundation
1995: Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
2004: Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
2011: Booker Prize, winner, The Sense of an Ending
2015: Zinklar Award at the first annual Blixen Ceremony in Copenhagen
2017: Officier in the Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur
2021: Yasnaya Polyana Prize winner, Nothing to Be Frightened Of who is "probably an atheist".

Barnes had a "health scare" in 2020, which he was initially reticent about in public.

After 8 years of romance, Barnes secretly married his second wife Rachel Cugnoni in August 2025, but did not make it public until just before he turned 80 the following year.

Works

Novels

Metroland (1980)
Before She Met Me (1982)
Flaubert's Parrot (1984) – shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize; winner of both the 1985 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and 1986 Prix Médicis Essai
Staring at the Sun (1986)
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989)
Talking It Over (1991)
The Porcupine (1992)
England, England (1998) – shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize
Love, etc (2000) – sequel to Talking It Over
Arthur & George (2005) – shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize and the 2007 Dublin Literary Award;, was on The New York Times bestsellers list for Hardback Fiction, a first for Barnes.
The Sense of an Ending (2011) – several weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list; winner of the 2011 Booker Prize.
The Noise of Time (2016)
The Only Story (2018)
Elizabeth Finch (2022)
Departure(s) (2026)

Collections

Cross Channel (1996)
The Lemon Table (2004)
Pulse (2011)

Translations

Alphonse Daudet: In the Land of Pain (2002), translation of Daudet's La Doulou The novels centred around the main character Duffy, a former police detective turned security advisor. The character of Duffy represents one of Britain's first bisexual male detectives. Barnes said the use of a pseudonym is "liberating in that you could indulge any fantasies of violence you might have". While Metroland – his first novel, published in 1980 – took Barnes eight years to write, Duffy and the rest of the Kavanagh books typically took fewer 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".

"Duffy the private detective" books

Duffy (1980)
Fiddle City (1981)
Putting the Boot In (1985)
Going to the Dogs (1987)

Short story

"The 50p Santa. A Duffy Detective Story" (1985)

References

External links

Official Website of Julian Barnes
Official Website of Dan Kavanagh (pseudonym)