Julian Barnes (English writer) Add a review

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English essayist, novelist and short story writer.

After completing his education, Barnes spent three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement. His first work of fiction – Metroland – was published in 1980, with his second – Before She Met Me – following two years later. Flaubert's Parrot was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, was a finalist for the 1988 Grinzane Cavour Prize, and won both the 1985 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the 1986 Prix Médicis Essai. Barnes published Staring at the Sun and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters later the same decade.

Talking It Over – published in 1991 – won the 1992 Prix Femina étranger, and was followed nine years later by a sequel titled Love, etc, in between which the short story collection Cross Channel and two longer works – The Porcupine and England, England – appeared. Arthur & George was shortlisted for both the 2005 Booker Prize and 2007 Dublin Literary Award, while The Sense of an Ending won the former prize in 2011. Two further short story collections – The Lemon Table and Pulse – were published in 2004 and 2011 respectively.

Among Barnes's later works of fiction were The Noise of Time, The Only Story and Elizabeth Finch. To coincide with his 80th birthday in January 2026 he published Departure(s), saying it would be his last book. Alongside his fictional work – he wrote four works of crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh – he has published several essay collections, as well as two memoirs and the nonfiction book, The Man in the Red Coat – about people of Belle Époque Paris in the arts. He also translated In the Land of Pain from French into English.

Appointed 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, his other honours include the 1986 E. M. Forster Award, the 1993 Shakespeare Prize, the 2004 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2016 Siegfried Lenz Prize and the 2021 Jerusalem Prize. He has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.