Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes was born on January 19, 1946, in the city of Leicester. He graduated from the University of Oxford, specializing in Western European languages, after which he worked as a lexicographer on the Oxford Dictionary. His first literary experiments were detective stories, which Barnes published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. After a number of publications in literary almanacs, he published his first novel, Metroland, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award. The novel tells the story of a generation of rebels and nihilists of the 1960s. His novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) became a major literary event. Written in the genre of dystopia, the novel seeks answers to a number of philosophical questions about human nature and about the past, present, and future of humankind. Among Barnes’s works are novellas about love, such as Before She Met Me and Love, etc. The novel Flaubert’s Parrot is an interesting exploration of the role of the author in the creative process. He was married to his literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, with whom he lived in North London. In October 2008, Pat died suddenly of cancer. Barnes was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times during his writing career. In 2011, he received it for the novel The Sense of an Ending.