Julian Barnes
Author of The Sense of an Ending
About the Author
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, on January 19, 1946. He received a degree in modern languages from Magdalen College, Oxford University in 1968. He has held jobs as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary, a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the New show more Review, and a television critic. He has written numerous works of fiction including Arthur and George, Pulse: Stories, The Noise of Time, and England, England. He received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1980 for Metroland, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1985 and a Prix Medicis in 1986 for Flaubert's Parrot, and the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. He also writes non-fiction works including Letters from London, The Pedant in the Kitchen, and Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He received the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation in 1993, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2004, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2011. He writes detective novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanaugh. His works under this name include Duffy, Fiddle City, Putting the Boot In, and Going to the Dogs. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Julian Barnes
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (2012) 279 copies, 13 reviews
Upstream: Short Stories 5 copies
Αναχωρήσεις 4 copies
Vertrek(punt) 2 copies
The Limner 2 copies
East wind 2 copies
Playing Chess with Arthur Koestler 2 copies
Plecare, plecări 1 copy
“Flaubert's Death Masks” 1 copy
Nieuw Werk 1 copy
PAPAGALLI I FLOBERIT 1 copy
NIVELE JETE 1 copy
ZHURMA E KOHES 1 copy
ENIGMA E NJË FUNDI 1 copy
Oklukirpi 1 copy
Knowing French (Storycuts) 1 copy
Complicity 1 copy
Krauts 1 copy
Writers on Artists 1 copy
2009 1 copy
Sleeping With John Updike 1 copy
Hygiene (Storycuts) 1 copy
Introduction to "The Reef" 1 copy
One of a Kind 1 copy
Associated Works
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink (2007) — Contributor — 595 copies, 10 reviews
The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories (1999) — Contributor — 394 copies, 5 reviews
A Book of Mediterranean Food and Other Writings (2006) — Preface, some editions — 63 copies, 1 review
The Public Domain Review: Selected Essays, The First Three Years, 2011-2013 (2014) — Contributor — 33 copies, 2 reviews
Maigret Three-Volume Set: Maigret and the Calame Report; Maigret and the Saturday Caller; Maigret and the Wine Merchant — Introduction, some editions — 10 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Barnes, Julian Patrick
- Other names
- Kavanagh, Dan
Pygge, Edward - Birthdate
- 1946-01-19
- Gender
- male
- Education
- City of London School
Magdalen College, Oxford University (BA|1968) - Occupations
- lexicographer
literary editor
television critic
novelist - Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Honorary member, 2016)
- Awards and honors
- David Cohen British Literature Prize (2011)
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Commandeur, 2004)
Jerusalem Prize (2021)
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Chevalier. 1988)
Siegfried Lenz Prize (2016)
Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2004) (show all 7)
E. M. Forster Award (1986) - Relationships
- Barnes, Jonathan (brother)
- Short biography
- Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964 and at Magdalen College, Oxford, from which he graduated in modern languages (with honours) in 1968.
After graduation, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement for three years. In 1977, Barnes began working as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for the Observer.
Barnes has received several awards and honours for his writing, including the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending. Three additional novels were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (Flaubert's Parrot 1984, England, England 1998, and Arthur & George 2005). Barnes's other awards include the Somerset Maugham Award (Metroland 1981), Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (FP 1985); Prix Médicis (FP 1986); E. M. Forster Award (American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1986); Gutenberg Prize (1987); Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italy, 1988); and the Prix Femina (Talking It Over 1992). Barnes was made a 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. In 1993 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation and in 2004 won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. In 2011 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Awarded biennially, the prize honours a lifetime's achievement in literature for a writer in the English language who is a citizen of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. He received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in 2013 and the 2015 Zinklar Award at the first annual Blixen Ceremony in Copenhagen. In 2016, the American Academy of Arts & Letters elected Barnes as an honorary foreign member. Also in 2016, Barnes was selected as the second recipient of the Siegfried Lenz Prize for his outstanding contributions as a European narrator and essayist.
Julian Barnes has written numerous novels, short stories, and essays. He has also translated a book by French author Alphonse Daudet and a collection of German cartoons by Volker Kriegel. His writing has earned him considerable respect as an author who deals with the themes of history, reality, truth and love. - Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Leicester, Leicestershire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Northwood, Middlesex, England, UK
London, Middlesex, England, UK - Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Discussions
April 2026: Julian Barnes in Monthly Author Reads (May 3)
Group Read: Arthur & George by Julian Barnes in 75 Books Challenge for 2018 (February 2018)
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (Bowie's Top 100 for August) in 75 Books Challenge for 2016 (August 2016)
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes in Booker Prize (August 2011)
Reviews
This reads like the script of a talking-heads adaptation of an Iris Murdoch novel.
The main characters are friendless and damaged, but intriguing, and there’s a Svengali-figure manipulating things. It’s broadly chronological, with protagonists taking turns to give their account of the next bit of the story - which often differs subtly but significantly from how the others describe it. They know the others are also talking to the reader (viewer?), but don’t know exactly what they’ve show more said.
“Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.”
Name and pronoun changes (including debate of singular “they”, in 1991), forgetfulness and deliberate deception (they all withhold vital information), the metaphors of picture restoration (you can uncover secrets, but reversibility matters too), wearing (and not wearing) make-up, coupled with different narrators, create an intriguing, tangled, and often contradictory story.
Whose narrative would you trust the most?
• Stuart: “I remember everything.”
• Gillian: “Just because I don’t have a confessional nature doesn’t mean I forget things.”
• Oliver: “I remember all the important things.”
It’s a triangle from the start, so aspects of the plot are obvious - jealousy and guilt, especially - muddied as they shift roles.
Image: Karpman’s Drama Triangle of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim (Source)
There is occasional input from a few peripheral characters, but it’s mainly Stuart, Gillian, and Oliver’s story, told by them. Oliver is insufferable, with something of Boris Johnson’s style of pompous, esoteric, demeaning, buffoonery: “Gillian’s rebarbative quotidian motor-car” is typical.
The portrayal of the fear of AIDS is, thankfully, rather dated, but it’s an enjoyable read about largely unlikeable people, with an ending that went in slightly unexpected directions. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see my review HERE), Miss Prism famously tells Cecily: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Miss Prism might be shocked by aspects of this story, and I’m not sure she’d class it as fiction.
Quotes
• “There’s no ‘real’ picture under there waiting to be revealed.”
• “The only Darling I can trust is a Darling I’ve paid for.”
• “I’ve gone away, they’ve gone away, but it’s not over.”
• “You can’t just ‘be happy’; you have to manage happiness.”
• “Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.”
See also
• I’ve reviewed a few Barnes books, HERE.
• I’ve reviewed more than a dozen Iris Murdoch novels, HERE.
• Alan Bennett is the master of the Talking Heads format, though usually just one person's viewpoint. See my review HERE.
Reading friends' reviews of this, I discover there's a sequel, Love, etc, but I'm unsure about whether to seek it out or not. I think I prefer to leave things as they are - and I'm not sure I have the stomach for more of Oliver. show less
The main characters are friendless and damaged, but intriguing, and there’s a Svengali-figure manipulating things. It’s broadly chronological, with protagonists taking turns to give their account of the next bit of the story - which often differs subtly but significantly from how the others describe it. They know the others are also talking to the reader (viewer?), but don’t know exactly what they’ve show more said.
“Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.”
Name and pronoun changes (including debate of singular “they”, in 1991), forgetfulness and deliberate deception (they all withhold vital information), the metaphors of picture restoration (you can uncover secrets, but reversibility matters too), wearing (and not wearing) make-up, coupled with different narrators, create an intriguing, tangled, and often contradictory story.
Whose narrative would you trust the most?
• Stuart: “I remember everything.”
• Gillian: “Just because I don’t have a confessional nature doesn’t mean I forget things.”
• Oliver: “I remember all the important things.”
It’s a triangle from the start, so aspects of the plot are obvious - jealousy and guilt, especially - muddied as they shift roles.
Image: Karpman’s Drama Triangle of Persecutor, Rescuer, and Victim (Source)
There is occasional input from a few peripheral characters, but it’s mainly Stuart, Gillian, and Oliver’s story, told by them. Oliver is insufferable, with something of Boris Johnson’s style of pompous, esoteric, demeaning, buffoonery: “Gillian’s rebarbative quotidian motor-car” is typical.
The portrayal of the fear of AIDS is, thankfully, rather dated, but it’s an enjoyable read about largely unlikeable people, with an ending that went in slightly unexpected directions. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (see my review HERE), Miss Prism famously tells Cecily: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Miss Prism might be shocked by aspects of this story, and I’m not sure she’d class it as fiction.
Quotes
• “There’s no ‘real’ picture under there waiting to be revealed.”
• “The only Darling I can trust is a Darling I’ve paid for.”
• “I’ve gone away, they’ve gone away, but it’s not over.”
• “You can’t just ‘be happy’; you have to manage happiness.”
• “Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.”
See also
• I’ve reviewed a few Barnes books, HERE.
• I’ve reviewed more than a dozen Iris Murdoch novels, HERE.
• Alan Bennett is the master of the Talking Heads format, though usually just one person's viewpoint. See my review HERE.
Reading friends' reviews of this, I discover there's a sequel, Love, etc, but I'm unsure about whether to seek it out or not. I think I prefer to leave things as they are - and I'm not sure I have the stomach for more of Oliver. show less
“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more, or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, finally, I think, the only real question. “ Novel provides a peek into middle class England 60s/70s suburbia as backdrop for a young man’s love affair with an older woman. Unhappy in her marriage and life, her interior perspective is never stated; perhaps her eventual descent into alcoholism results from a “too late” despair — a love 30 years too late. POV always of Paul but show more shifts from first person (youth, beginning) to second person (ending of affair, older) to third (retrospective), which not many authors could pull off. Story about the nature of memory and the inexplicable nature of love; everyone has a story (The Only Story). Running theme of truth over accuracy; memory serves the greater truth, not every factual detail. While frustrating at times to not know Susan’s POV, it ultimately serves the story: we never really know another person.
“Here was a paradox. When he had been with Susan, they had scarcely discussed their love, analyzed it, sought to understand its shape, it’s colour, it’s weight and it’s boundaries. It was simply there, an inevitable fact, an unshaken given. But it was also the case that neither of them had the words, the experience, the mental equipment to discuss it. Later, in his thirties and forties, he had gradually acquired emotional lucidity. But in these later relationships of him, he had felt less deeply, and there was less to discuss, so his potential articulacy was rarely required.“ The sad truth is not that we get over an early love, but that we do. We grow up and mature against our better judgement; compassion fatigue and anger fatigue in equal measure. show less
“Here was a paradox. When he had been with Susan, they had scarcely discussed their love, analyzed it, sought to understand its shape, it’s colour, it’s weight and it’s boundaries. It was simply there, an inevitable fact, an unshaken given. But it was also the case that neither of them had the words, the experience, the mental equipment to discuss it. Later, in his thirties and forties, he had gradually acquired emotional lucidity. But in these later relationships of him, he had felt less deeply, and there was less to discuss, so his potential articulacy was rarely required.“ The sad truth is not that we get over an early love, but that we do. We grow up and mature against our better judgement; compassion fatigue and anger fatigue in equal measure. show less
Although it's framed as a biographical fiction about Shostakovich, that's almost a pretext: what Barnes is really interested in here is clearly the relationship between the creative artist and power. The artist may be a genius in his field, but he's still a human being, and not necessarily an exceptionally brave or reckless one. What does it do to him if he's confronted by threats and demands he doesn't have it in him to resist?
Shostakovich got a major ponck from Stalin after the opening of show more The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District: after that he slowly worked his way out of official disfavour by compromising left, right and centre (or by ironically pretending to compromise: no-one quite knows, although plenty of people are still arguing about it), until he found himself being drawn uncomfortably close to power in the Khrushchev era.
Barnes tries to imagine what it might have been like to be inside Shostakovich's mind at those points. He doesn't really have any more evidence for that than we do, however, and he ends up with a character who is endearingly human and is undergoing the same kinds of fears and doubts that we might, but who somehow doesn't seem to have whatever it is about him that makes Shostakovich Shostakovich. We never get a real sense of him as someone whose life is built around music. In fact there's very little music in the book: most of the time, all that we hear is how other people have reacted to Shostakovich's music.
Interesting, but the effort Barnes must have put into researching this somehow seems disproportionate to the result. show less
Shostakovich got a major ponck from Stalin after the opening of show more The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District: after that he slowly worked his way out of official disfavour by compromising left, right and centre (or by ironically pretending to compromise: no-one quite knows, although plenty of people are still arguing about it), until he found himself being drawn uncomfortably close to power in the Khrushchev era.
Barnes tries to imagine what it might have been like to be inside Shostakovich's mind at those points. He doesn't really have any more evidence for that than we do, however, and he ends up with a character who is endearingly human and is undergoing the same kinds of fears and doubts that we might, but who somehow doesn't seem to have whatever it is about him that makes Shostakovich Shostakovich. We never get a real sense of him as someone whose life is built around music. In fact there's very little music in the book: most of the time, all that we hear is how other people have reacted to Shostakovich's music.
Interesting, but the effort Barnes must have put into researching this somehow seems disproportionate to the result. show less
‘Uxorious,’ Julian Barnes insists in the final essay of this grief-bound trilogy, “describes — and always will, whatever future dictionaries may permit — a man who loves his wife.” Julian Barnes is such a man. The death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh, in 2008 plunges him into a grief that he is utterly unprepared for, though grief, he notes, like death, “is banal and unique.” In a sense, we learn nothing from the grief of others. Nevertheless, the uxorious Barnes seeks in Levels show more of Life to in some way memorialize the love of his life.
Curiously (and not) the first two essays in this slim volume involve lighter than air flight, the antics of 19th century balloonists, and a love that was larger than life. This is exquisitely beautiful writing — Barnes at his best. Filled with erudition, lightly worn, but oh so artful in its representation. It is the kind of writing that gives one hope for creative non-fiction. If only it could always be like this. But perhaps that is asking too much. And certainly when Barnes turns to his particular case of personal grief in the third essay, the level of artfulness diminishes significantly. It is as though the closer he gets to himself, the less he is able to sustain those airy heights. Well, that’s grief all over, isn’t it?
Warmly recommended. show less
Curiously (and not) the first two essays in this slim volume involve lighter than air flight, the antics of 19th century balloonists, and a love that was larger than life. This is exquisitely beautiful writing — Barnes at his best. Filled with erudition, lightly worn, but oh so artful in its representation. It is the kind of writing that gives one hope for creative non-fiction. If only it could always be like this. But perhaps that is asking too much. And certainly when Barnes turns to his particular case of personal grief in the third essay, the level of artfulness diminishes significantly. It is as though the closer he gets to himself, the less he is able to sustain those airy heights. Well, that’s grief all over, isn’t it?
Warmly recommended. show less
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Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 89
- Also by
- 40
- Members
- 43,073
- Popularity
- #395
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 1,535
- ISBNs
- 1,241
- Languages
- 30
- Favorited
- 123
