Julian Barnes Biography

English writer Julian Barnes is best known as the novelist who won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending.

Once a journalist and television critic, Barnes began writing novels in the 1980s. His debut novel Metroland (1981), set in the suburbs of London, brought raves from critics and won the Somerset Maugham Award.

Since then he’s written essays and novels and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, for Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), England, England (1998) and Arthur & George (2005).

Known for his attention to literary structure and for his themes of love, art and death, Barnes has joined the ranks of Beryl Bainbridge, John Banville and Ian McEwan as one of the highest-ranking British novelists.

He has also published short stories (including the 2011 collection Pulse) and non-fiction (2008’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of), and has written detective stories under the name Dan Kavanagh (publishing four mystery novels between 1980 and 1987).

Barnes won the prestigious David Cohen Prize for Literature for his body of work in 2011 and is especially popular in France.