Julian Barnes | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Barnes in 2019 | |
| Born | (1946-01-19)19 January 1946 (age 80) Leicester, England |
| Pen name | Dan Kavanagh (crime fiction), Edward Pygge |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Alma mater | Magdalen College,Oxford |
| Genre | Novels, short stories, essays, memoirs |
| Literary movement | Postmodernism |
| Notable awards | Prix Femina 1992 Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres 2004 Man Booker Prize 2011 Jerusalem Prize 2021 |
| Spouse | |
| Relatives | Jonathan Barnes (brother) |
| Website | |
| julianbarnes | |
Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. He won theMan Booker Prize in 2011 withThe Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously withFlaubert's Parrot,England, England, andArthur & George. Barnes has also writtencrime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (having marriedPat Kavanagh).[1] 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 ofBelle ÉpoqueParis in the arts.
In 2004, he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include theSomerset Maugham Award and theGeoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021Jerusalem Prize.[2]
Barnes was born inLeicester, in theEast Midlands of England, on 19 January 1946, although his family moved to the outer suburbs ofLondon six weeks afterwards.[3][4] Both of his parents were French teachers.[3][1] He has said that his support forLeicester City Football Club was, aged four or five, "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city.[4] At the age of 10, Barnes was told by his mother that he had "too much imagination".[3]
In 1956, the family moved toNorthwood,Middlesex, the 'Metro-land' of his first novel.[3] He was educated at theCity of London School from 1957 to 1964. He then went on toMagdalen College, Oxford, where he studied modern languages.[5] After graduation, he worked for three years as alexicographer for theOxford English Dictionary supplement.[5] He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for theNew Statesman and theNew Review.[5] During his time at theNew 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."[3] From 1979 to 1986, he worked as a television critic, first for theNew Statesman and then forThe Observer.[5]
His first novel,Metroland, published in 1980, is the story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels toParis, 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.[3]
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 ofGustave 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."[6]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 theBooker Prize.[7]
In 1986, Barnes publishedStaring 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 publishedA 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 agentPat Kavanagh).[8] 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".[9] WhileMetroland, 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".[10]
During the 1990s, Barnes wrote several additional novels and works of journalism. In 1991, he publishedTalking It Over, about a contemporary love triangle, in which the three characters take turns to talk to the reader, reflecting on common events. This was followed by a sequel published in 2000 calledLove, etc, which revisited the characters ten years on.[11] Barnes's novelThe Porcupine (1992) again deals with a historical theme as it depicts 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.England, England (1998) is a humorous novel that explores the idea of national identity as the entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman creates a theme park on the Isle of Wight that resembles some of the tourist spots of England. Barnes is a keenFrancophile, and his 1996 book,Cross Channel, is a collection of 10 stories charting Britain's relationship with France.[1] He also returned to the topic of France inSomething to Declare, a collection of essays on French subjects.
In 2003, Barnes undertook a rare acting role as the voice ofGeorges Simenon in aBBC Radio 4 series of adaptations ofInspector Maigret stories.[12]Arthur & George (2005), a fictional account of a true crime that was investigated bySir Arthur Conan Doyle, launched Barnes's career into the more popular mainstream. It was the first of his novels to be featured onThe New York Times bestsellers list for Hardback Fiction.
Barnes's 11th novel,The Sense of an Ending, published byJonathan Cape, was released on 4 August 2011.[13] In October of that year, the book was awarded theMan Booker Prize.[14] The judges took 31 minutes to decide the winner and head judge,Stella Rimington, said thatThe Sense of an Ending was a "beautifully written book" and the panel thought it "spoke to humankind in the 21st Century."[14][15]The Sense of an Ending also won theEuropese Literatuurprijs and was on theNew York Times Bestseller list for several weeks.
In 2013, Barnes publishedLevels of Life. The first section of the work gives a history of early ballooning andaerial photography, describing the work ofGaspard-Félix Tournachon. The second part is a short story aboutFred Burnaby and the French actorSarah Bernhardt, both alsoballoonists. 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."[16] InThe Guardian,Blake Morrison 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."[17]
In 2013, Barnes took on the British government over its "mass closure of public libraries", Britain's "slip down the world league table for literacy" and its "ideological worship of the market – as quasi-religious as nature-worship – and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor".[18]
In 2025, Barnes published the essays entitledChanging 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 whathis 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".[19]
Barnes's brother,Jonathan Barnes, is a philosopher specialising inancient philosophy. Julian Barnes is a patron of the human rights organisationFreedom from Torture, for which he has sponsored several fundraising events, andDignity in Dying, a campaign group for assisted dying.[20] He has lived inTufnell Park, north London, since 1983. Barnes is anagnostic.[21] Barnes marriedPat Kavanagh, a literary agent, in 1979. She died on 20 October 2008 of a brain tumour. Barnes wrote about his grief over his wife's death in an essay in his 2013 book,Levels of Life.[17][1] He married his second wife Rachel Cugnoni in August 2025.[22] Barnes is undergoing treatment for a rare form of blood cancer, diagnosed in 2020; due to his illness, he has namedDeparture(s) as his final book to be published; it went on sale in the UK on 20 January 2026, the day after Barnes's 80th birthday.[23]
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Julian Barnes, an atheist turned agnostic
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