Julian Barnes(1946–)

Julian Patrick Barnes was born at Leicester General Hospital on 19 January 1946, the second son of Albert Leonard Barnes, a French teacher at the Spens-era Leicester Wyggeston Grammar School, and Kathleen Mary Scoltock, a French teacher at the same school. The household was French-speaking by working preference: both parents had taken their degrees in modern languages, the family holidays were spent in small French rented gîtes in Normandy and the Loire, and the boys (Julian and his elder brother Jonathan, who later became Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Oxford) were brought up bilingually French-English from primary-school age. The family moved to Northwood on the outer London Metropolitan-line suburbs in 1956 when his father took a post at the Northwood Country Grammar School; he was schooled at the City of London School from 1957 and went up to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1964 to read modern languages.

He came down from Oxford in 1968 with a third-class degree (he had spent a substantial portion of the final year on the editing of the *Cherwell* student paper rather than on the French-and-Russian tripos). The post-graduation work was a long apprenticeship in literary journalism and lexicography: three years as a lexicographer with the *Oxford English Dictionary* supplement at Walton Street, Oxford between 1969 and 1972 (he is the named contributor of the entries on, among others, *bohemian*, *kebab* and *gormless* in the OED second supplement of 1972), four years as a junior staff-writer at the *New Statesman* through the late 1970s, and the chief reviewer's chair at the *Sunday Times* from 1981 to 1986. He moved into book-length fiction in 1980 with the first novel *Metroland*, the autobiographical-suburban Oxford-and-Paris coming-of-age book that drew on the Northwood and the post-1968 Paris years.

*Flaubert's Parrot* (1984) was the breakthrough. The novel was an exercise in literary biography in the form of a obsessive monograph: the narrator, a widowed English doctor named Geoffrey Braithwaite, sets out to identify the stuffed parrot Flaubert wrote *Un cœur simple* in front of, and the novel runs Braithwaite's investigation across French museums, Flaubert-biographer archives, and the foundational French-literary critical canon as the architecture of a unmarked English-fiction novel. The book was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize (lost to Anita Brookner's *Hotel du Lac*) and reset the possibilities of the English biographical-fiction register for the next two decades. Across the next ten years he wrote *Staring at the Sun* (1986), *A History of the World in 10½ Chapters* (1989), *Talking it Over* (1991, his favourite of his own novels), and *The Porcupine* (1992, the Eastern-European post-communist novella that was published in Bulgarian translation before the English original). He was, by the mid-1990s, the second-most-published English novelist of his generation in French translation, the senior English figure of the English-French literary-intellectual exchange of the post-war decades.

He married the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, of the Peters Fraser & Dunlop agency, in 1979. The marriage was the partnership of his adult life. Pat Kavanagh died of a brain tumour at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, on 20 October 2008 after a thirty-seven-day illness; the surrounding three years of grief and gradual return to writing were the subject of *Levels of Life* (2013), the three-part essay on grief that is the most directly autobiographical book he has written. The 2011 Booker Prize came on the strength of *The Sense of an Ending*, the two-hundred-page novel on memory and on the way the past becomes unrecoverable to the people who lived it. He had been shortlisted three times before (*Flaubert's Parrot* 1984, *England, England* 1998, *Arthur and George* 2005). He won at sixty-five and the ceremony was at the Guildhall in London with the foreman of the jury Stella Rimington reading the citation.

He has lived in Tufnell Park, north London, since 1980 and works at a small office above the Holloway Road on the day-rota of the long-fixed working novelist of the 1980s generation alongside Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis (the four together were the Granta-1983-Best-of-Young-British-Novelists nucleus that has been the middle generation of English-language fiction of the four decades since). He was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004, the *Légion d'honneur* by the French Republic in 2017, and has continued working through the 2010s and 2020s on the post-Kavanagh novels (*The Noise of Time*, 2016, on Shostakovich; *The Only Story*, 2018; *Elizabeth Finch*, 2022). The Barnes name in its English-side catalogue is the locative *barnes*, the place of the barns and the granaries scattered across the southern English parish maps; he carries it from a Leicester French-teaching household into the foundational late-twentieth-century English-novel register that took the European intellectual tradition into the line of the modern English novel.