Julian Barnes(1946–)

Julian Patrick Barnes was born at Leicester on 19 January 1946, the second son of two French teachers; the household was bilingual French-English from primary-school age. He went to the City of London School and up to Magdalen College, Oxford in 1964 to read modern languages.

The post-graduation work was a long apprenticeship in lexicography and literary journalism: three years as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary supplement, the named contributor of entries including bohemian and gormless; staff-writing at the New Statesman; and the chief reviewer's chair at the Sunday Times from 1981. He moved into fiction in 1980 with Metroland.

Flaubert's Parrot (1984) was the breakthrough: a novel in the form of an obsessive monograph, a widowed English doctor tracking the stuffed parrot Flaubert wrote in front of, that reset the possibilities of the English biographical-fiction register for two decades. It was shortlisted for the Booker. Across the next ten years came Staring at the Sun (1986), A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), Talking it Over (1991) and The Porcupine (1992); by the mid-1990s he was the senior English figure of the English-French literary exchange.

He married the literary agent Pat Kavanagh in 1979, the partnership of his adult life; after her death he wrote 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 for The Sense of an Ending, his novel on memory and the unrecoverable past, after three previous shortlistings; he won at sixty-five.

He has lived in north London since 1980 and worked alongside Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis as part of the Granta 1983 Best of Young British Novelists generation that has been the middle generation of English-language fiction ever since. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 2004 and given the Légion d'honneur in 2017, and has continued through the 2010s and 2020s with The Noise of Time (2016), The Only Story (2018) and Elizabeth Finch (2022). The Barnes name, the locative place of the barns scattered across the southern English parish maps, he carries from a Leicester French-teaching household into the late-twentieth-century English novel that took the European intellectual tradition into its line.