Julian Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes is an English essayist, novelist, and short story writer, born in Leicester on 19 January 1946. His family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks later, but the city of his birth stayed with him: he later said that supporting Leicester City Football Club as a child was “a sentimental way of hanging on” to his home city. He was the younger brother of philosopher Jonathan Barnes, and both of their parents were French teachers. At the age of 10, his mother told him he had “too much imagination.”

In 1956 the family moved to Northwood, Middlesex, the “Metro-land” that would give Barnes the setting and title for his first novel. He attended the City of London School from 1957 to 1964, then studied modern languages at Magdalen College, Oxford. After graduating, he spent three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement, specialising in “sports and dirty words.” He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review, and as a television critic from 1979 to 1986, first for the New Statesman and then for The Observer. During his time at the New Statesman, he suffered from debilitating shyness and said he was “paralysed into silence” in weekly meetings.

Barnes’s first novel, Metroland, appeared in 1980. It follows Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels to Paris as a student and later returns to London, and it deals with idealism and sexual fidelity. His second novel, Before She Met Me, was published in 1982 and tells a darker story of jealousy and revenge. His breakthrough came with Flaubert’s Parrot in 1984, a fragmentary biographical-style novel about an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, and his obsession with Gustave Flaubert. Barnes has said of Flaubert, “he’s the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh.” The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, became a finalist for the Grinzane Cavour Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Prix Médicis Essai.

Through the late 1980s and 1990s, Barnes kept changing shape as a novelist. Staring at the Sun follows a woman growing to maturity in postwar England and addresses love, truth, and mortality. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters uses a nonlinear form and varied styles to question ideas of human history and knowledge. Talking It Over, published in 1991, won the Prix Femina étranger and was followed in 2000 by Love, etc. Between them came The Porcupine, England, England, and the story collection Cross Channel, which charts Britain’s relationship with France.

His later fiction includes Arthur & George, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dublin Literary Award, and The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker Prize in 2011. He also published the story collections The Lemon Table and Pulse, the novels The Noise of Time, The Only Story, and Elizabeth Finch, four works of crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, several essay collections, two memoirs, and The Man in the Red Coat, a nonfiction book about people of Belle Époque Paris in the arts. He translated In the Land of Pain from French into English. Honoured in France as Chevalier, Officier, and Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Barnes has also received prizes including the E. M. Forster Award, the Shakespeare Prize, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the Siegfried Lenz Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize. His line, “The more you learn, the less you fear,” suits a writer whose work keeps returning to knowledge, memory, history, and the exact weight of words.