Discover the Best Books Written by Julian Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.

In 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honors also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize. Barnes was born in Leicester, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterward.

Both of his parents were French teachers. He has said that his support for Leicester City Football Club was, aged four or five, "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city. At the age of 10, Barnes was told by his mother that he had "too much imagination." In 1956, the family moved to Northwood, Middlesex, the 'Metroland' of his first novel. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964. 

He then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied Modern Languages. After graduation, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement for three years. He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, saying: "When there were weekly meetings, I would be paralyzed into silence and was thought of as the mute member of staff".

From 1979 to 1986, he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for The Observer. His first novel, Metroland, is the story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels to Paris 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.

His second novel, Before She Met Me, 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, departed from the traditional linear structure of his previous novels. It featured a fragmentary biographical style story of an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who focuses obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert. 

In reference to 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 it helped establish Barnes as one of the pre-eminent writers of his generation. In 1980, Barnes, under the name Dan Kavanagh (Barnes had recently married the literary agent Pat Kavanagh), published the first of four crime novels about Duffy, one of Britain's first gay male detectives. 

Barnes was quoted as calling the use of a pseudonym "liberating in that you could indulge any fantasies of violence you might have." While Metroland, also published in 1980, took Barnes eight years to write, Duffy took less than two weeks—an experiment to test "what it would be like writing as fast as I possibly could in a concentrated way." Staring at the Sun followed in 1986, another ambitious novel about a woman growing to maturity in post-war England and dealing with issues of love, truth, and mortality.