Booker prize 2011: Julian Barnes triumphs at last | Books | The Guardian Books Booker prize 2011: Julian Barnes triumphs at last Fourth time lucky for Julian Barnes, who wins the Man Booker prize 2011 for his novel The Sense of an Ending after missing out on three previous occasions Author Julian Barnes smiles after winning the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction with his book The Sense of an Ending at the Guildhall in London. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters Tuesday 18 October 2011 19.15 EDT First published on Tuesday 18 October 2011 19.15 EDT Close This article is 5 years old Julian Barnes finally won the literary prize that has eluded him on three previous occasions when he was tonight presented with the Man Booker prize for his short novel, The Sense of an Ending . His victory came after one of the most bitter and vituperative run-ups to the prize in living memory - not among the shortlisted writers, but from dismayed and bemused commentators who accused judges of putting populism above genuine quality . But few of those critics could claim Barnes' novel is not of the highest quality.

The chair of this year's judges, former MI5 director general Stella Rimington, said it had "the markings of a classic of English Literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading." Much of the row over the shortlist has stemmed from Rimington's own prioritisation of "readability" in the judging criteria. But tonight, she said quality had always been just as important. "It is a very readable book, if I may use that word, but readable not only once but twice and even three times," she said. "It is incredibly concentrated. Crammed into this short space is a great deal of information which you don't get out of a first read." Accepting the prize, Barnes thanked the judges for their wisdom and the sponsors for their cheque. He also offered some advice to publishers: "Those of you who have seen my book, whatever you think of its contents, will probably agree it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we've come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the ebook, it has to look like something worth buying, worth keeping." Afterwards Barnes admitted a sense of relief at finally winning.

"I didn't want to go to my grave and get a Beryl," he said referring to Bainbridge, who was shortlisted five times, never won and received a posthumous Best of Beryl Booker prize . He said the "readability" row had been "a false hare" to which he had paid little attention, adding: "Most great books are readable. Any shortlist of the last ten years that I've read has contained nothing but what you would call readable books." Barnes once called the prize "posh bingo" and he said he had not changed his view – it simply depended on who the judges were and what they liked. "The Booker prize has a tendency to drive people a bit mad," he said, not least writers with "hope and lust and greed and expectation" so the best way to stay sane, he said, was by treating it as a lottery until you win "when you realise that the judges are the wisest heads in literary Christendom". Asked what he would spend the £50,000 prize money on he said a new watch strap was first on his list.

"I could buy a whole new watch." The book, at 150 pages, is undoubtedly short, but not the shortest to ever win the prize – that record belongs to Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore , which won in 1979 and is shorter by a few hundred words. The Sense of an Ending, Barnes' 11th novel, explores memory: how fuzzy it can be and how we amend the past to suit our own wellbeing. It tells the story through the apparently insignificant and dull life of arts administrator Tony Webster. "One of the things that the book does is talk about the human kind," said Rimington. "None of us really knows who we are. We present ourselves in all sorts of ways, but maybe the ways we present ourselves are not how we really are." Rimington said the question of whether Barnes was overdue to win the £50,000 prize never entered her mind or figured in the debate. "We really were, and I know you find it very boring of me to say so, looking at the books that we had in front of us," she said. Despite the sometimes hostile reaction to the shortlist, Rimington said she had enjoyed the process of judging.

"I've been through many crises at one time or another in which this one pales, I must say. We've been very interested by the discussion. We've followed it sometimes with great glee and amusement. The fact that it has been in the headlines is very gratifying." It took the judges (Rimington, MP Chris Mullin, author Susan Hill, the Daily Telegraph's head of books Gaby Wood and the former Spectator editor Matthew d'Ancona) just 31 minutes to decide on the winner, after what Rimington called "an interesting debate." They had been divided 3-2 at the beginning of the judging meeting, but were all agreed by the end. "There was no blood on the carpet, nobody went off in a huff and we all ended up firm friends and happy with the result," she said. Barnes, 65, had been shortlisted for the prize three times previously; in 1984 with Flaubert's Parrot , when he lost out to Anita Brookner; win 1998 with England, England , losing to Ian McEwan; and with Arthur & George in 2005, when he lost to John Banville.

What was particularly striking this year was that Barnes was the only seriously big hitter on the shortlist, and the only author to have been shortlisted previously. The others on the shortlist were Carol Birch for her much-admired Jamrach's Menagerie , a historical high seas adventure; two Canadian writers - Patrick deWitt for The Sisters Brothers , a picaresque western, and Esi Edugyan for Half Blood Blues , which mixes the raw beauty of jazz and the terror of Nazism; and two debut novels – Stephen Kelman for Pigeon English , which tells the story of a Ghanaian boy who turns detective on a south London housing estate; and AD Miller for Snowdrops , a Moscow-set tale of corruption and moral decline. The shortlist undoubtedly prompted a livelier debate about what makes a great novel with many commentators annoyed by judge Chris Mullin's belief that a book had to "zip along" to be worthy of being considered. Last year's Booker chairman Andrew Motion also weighed in , accusing the judges of creating a "false divde" between what is high end and what is readable, and questioning the absence of authors such as Alan Hollinghurst, Edward St Aubyn and Ali Smith.

The row has also led to a group of writers, publishers and agents announcing plans to set up a rival literary prize that would reward the artistic achievement of a writer above 'readability.' Full details of the Literature Prize have yet to be announced but the agent Andrew Kidd said they felt "a space has opened for a new prize which is unequivocally about excellence." However, not everyone condemned the shortlist. Book sellers, in particular, were happy with a list that resulted in record Booker sales. A spokesman for Waterstones, Jon Howell, called the critical reaction "ungracious sniping" and said Barnes was a worthy winner. If anyone is upset at the win, it may well be the bookies. William Hill said more than half of all bets had been for Barnes, a 6/4 favourite. • This article was amended on 19 October 2011. The original described Matthew d'Ancona as editor of the Spectator. This has been corrected to former editor. As you may have heard, Julian Barnes won the Booker prize last night with his novel The Sense of an Ending. The Booker judges are clearly fans - are you?

Take our quiz and find out Published: 19 Oct 2011 Julian Barnes Wins the Man Booker Prize - The New York Times The New York Times Books |Julian Barnes Wins the Man Booker Prize Search Continue reading the main story The novelist Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night for “The Sense of an Ending,” a slim and meditative story of mortality, frustration and regret. “The Sense of an Ending,” published in the United States by Knopf, part of Random House, is Mr. Barnes’s 11th novel, a 163-page book that has sometimes been called a novella for its size and simplicity. Mr. Barnes, 65, who lives in London, has been nominated for the Booker three times in the past. The prize, Britain’s best-known literary award, is given annually to a novel by an author in Britain, Ireland or one of the Commonwealth nations. The award is accompanied by a check for £50,000, or about $78,000, and comes with an immediate lift in book sales and visibility.

The chairwoman of the judging panel, Stella Rimington, a former chief of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, said in a statement that Mr. Barnes’s novel “has the markings of a classic of English literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said the book “manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story. We not only want to find out how Mr. Barnes’s narrator, Tony Webster, has rewritten his own history — and discover what actually happened some 40 years ago — but also understand why he has needed to do so.” The Booker selection brings an annual hand-wringing over the state of the award. This year, publishers and critics worried aloud that the prize had lost its literary merit in favor of commercial viability and readability. The Booker judges were criticized for their shortlist and for their public comments that they were looking for “readable” and “enjoyable” books, rather than those that would be bought and then placed on a shelf only to be admired.

Photo Julian Barnes Credit Alan Edwards The other books on the shortlist included “Snowdrops,” by A. D. Miller, a debut crime novel of greed, murder and morality in Moscow; “Pigeon English,” by Stephen Kelman, a novel that examines issues of urban poverty and violence from the perspective of a charming, inquisitive child in a London housing project; and “Jamrach’s Menagerie” by Carol Birch, an atmospheric historical novel that follows two boys on a sea expedition to the Dutch East Indies. Also shortlisted were two books by Canadian authors: “The Sisters Brothers,” by Patrick deWitt, a comic novel set in the gold-rush era of the American West; and “Half-Blood Blues,” by Esi Edugyan, a book that explores the black experience in Nazi Germany. Each of the shortlisted authors receives £2,500. The award was announced late Tuesday evening at a ceremony at the Guildhall in London. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Mr.

Barnes, the author of “Flaubert’s Parrot” and “Love, etc.,” was easily the best-known name of the shortlisted authors, especially in Britain, and was widely viewed as overdue for winning the Booker. In addition to his fiction, Mr. Barnes has written short stories and several collections of journalism. In the days leading up to the ceremony, bookmakers in Britain had decisively chosen Mr. Barnes as the likely winner, but past predictions have proved unreliable. Some suggested that the judging panel would be unlikely to pick Mr. Barnes because of his dismissive attitude toward the award in the past (he once referred to the Booker as “posh bingo”). If his book sales resemble those of previous Booker winners, like Howard Jacobson, Hilary Mantel and Kiran Desai, Mr. Barnes will see a boost in both Britain and the United States. In September, when the book was chosen for the Booker shortlist, Knopf moved up the publication date from January to Oct. 5. On Tuesday evening, Knopf took more steps to prepare for increased interest.

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, said the publisher had already shipped 23,000 copies but planned to print 25,000 more quickly. A version of this article appears in print on October 19, 2011, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Novelist Julian Barnes Wins the Man Booker Prize. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize | PBS NewsHour Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize EMAIL BY Jeffrey Brown November 8, 2011 at 2:25 PM EST The Man Booker Prize is given annually to a novel by an author in Britain, Ireland or one of the Commonwealth nations. It is highly prestigious, as well as often highly contentious and controversial. This year was no exception.

This year’s prize went to one of Britain’s leading writers, winning for his first time, Julian Barnes , for his novel, “The Sense of an Ending.” It was his fourth time being shortlisted for the award, which comes with an $80,000 prize and an untold amount of publicity. Barnes’ novel is about memory and tells the story of Tony Webster, a middle-aged man exploring his past. I recently spoke to Barnes on the phone from London about his novel and winning the award: A transcript is after the jump. JEFFREY BROWN: Welcome again to Art Beat. I’m Jeffrey Brown. The Man Booker Prize is given annually to a novel by an author in Britain, Ireland or one of the Commonwealth nations. It is highly prestigious, it is often highly contentious and controversial, but this year it’s gone to one of Britain’s leading writers, winning for his first time, Julian Barnes, for his novel, “The Sense of an Ending.” And Julian Barnes joins me now on the phone from London. Welcome and congratulations. JULIAN BARNES: Thank you very much.

JEFFREY BROWN: I guess before we get to the substance of the book, I should ask you if you’re happy, relieved to win, especially after you made the shortlist three times in the past. JULIAN BARNES: Yes. I think when my name was spoken, I think relief was the first emotion and then afterwards pleasure. JEFFREY BROWN: Relief first. JULIAN BARNES: Well, I’ve been shortlisted three times before. I knew all the ins and outs of not winning the Booker Prize, and I just thought it would be good to know the ins and outs of winning it. And since then, it has been untrammeled pleasure, I must say. JEFFREY BROWN: It gets a lot of attention. In what ways is it important to you as someone who’s written a number of other books, won many other prizes? JULIAN BARNES: It has a worldwide penetration, this prize.

And that will mean, I hope, that people who haven’t heard of me before will think, Oh, I’ll give him a go, and might enjoy my work and might discover that there are quite a number of books they can go back and look at. I’ve now written 20 books, so winning a prize at this stage in my life is not going to change either the way I write or my view of the world, but it might, and I hope it will, mean more readers. JEFFREY BROWN: Now, this book — the narrator is Tony Webster, a man in 60s who’s lived by his own telling a fairly ordinary life, but then some things happen that make him want to look back. I was thinking as I was reading it, it’s a long view but in a rather short book. Were you wanting to somehow explore a life, or rather, how a life is perceived by the one living it? What were you aiming to do? JULIAN BARNES: I wanted to write a book about time and memory, about what time does to memory, how it changes it, and what memory does to time.

It’s also a book about discovering at a certain point in your life that some key things that you’ve always believed were wrong. This is something that I started thinking about a few years ago, and it’s probably one of the preoccupations that you have as you age. You have your own memories of life, you’ve got the story that you tell mainly to yourself about what your life has been. And every so often these certainties are not. Something happens, someone reports something from 20 or 30 years ago, and you realize that what you’d believed is not the case. So I wanted to write about that. In terms of how much thematic matter there is and how comparatively short the book is — it’s 150 pages — I think one of the things that happens as you mature as a writer is that you learn better how to handle time. If you look at those late Updike stories — that’s a writer that I revere — he’s incredibly canny at dealing with a whole life in a short space of time. Alice Munro, the great Canadian short-story writer, she’s another one. She can do in 30 pages enough to give you the sense of an entire life.

My previous book was about 500 pages. JEFFREY BROWN: So you like the notion of paring down. JULIAN BARNES: I do, yes. I’m one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn’t have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form. But also, as I said, this is a novel about things that Tony Webster, without giving anything away, things that he doesn’t know and can’t find it. It’s to do with holes in his memory and life and in reality that he can’t pin down, and therefore it’s a short book for that reason as well. If it was a book about things he found out rather than things he couldn’t find out, it might have been 250 pages. JEFFREY BROWN: The interesting part for the reader and the sort of mystery that you weave here, is the reader is wondering is the narrator telling us the trust, right? Does he remember things accurately or is he revising history as you go?

JULIAN BARNES: That’s the question we ought to ask ourselves in life, I think. We rarely do, and I’m sure I’m as sinful as the rest of us in that respect. But, you know, we get to tell our stories and then as we get older the witnesses to our lives diminish, and so there are fewer people who actually can check or quarrel with our version of events. So if something comes along which puts your nose up against the wall of untruthfulness, that’s part of what generates the energy and the action of the book. JEFFREY BROWN: Is that true for all of your work, with what motivates you as a writer? Is it always some kind of, well, almost philosophical questions as much as the plot, the story that you want to tell? JULIAN BARNES: It’s equally important. You can’t have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity.

No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people. But beyond that, obviously, I’m interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true. JEFFREY BROWN: Which is good for journalism as well, right? JULIAN BARNES: It goes for journalism, it goes for witnesses in a law court, yes. JEFFREY BROWN: I’m curious now, because you were talking about short stories, and one thing I didn’t know about you — I know your novels, but I didn’t, until I was just reading about this prize, you wrote crime fiction under a pseudonym? JULIAN BARNES: I did, yes. I’ve been a jack of all trades. JEFFREY BROWN: I didn’t know that. And you wrote a collection on cooking.

JULIAN BARNES: I did, I did, yes. Actually that sort of ties into what we were just talking about. It was called “The Pedant in the Kitchen.” I came to cooking rather late. I wasn’t taught as a boy, so it was in my early 20s I started cooking out of necessity. And it’s the gap between what we’re told is the case — a recipe, a glossy photograph of what the dish looks like — and what actually comes out of our own kitchen that I’m interested in in that book, you know. It’s like instructions for sex and what sex is really like. There’s a gap there and the fiction writer — JEFFREY BROWN: You are not writing on that next are you? JULIAN BARNES: I’ve done that on and off throughout my fiction, and I’m sure I’ll come back to it again. JEFFREY BROWN: I know in the fiction, but a not a manual. JULIAN BARNES: I certainly wouldn’t write a sex manual, no. I think I’d have to be down on my luck.

JEFFREY BROWN: Finally, let me ask you — I want to come back to the Booker. There was the sort of great fuss and uproar, I guess, over especially in London, when the shortlist was announced and the questions about whether the prize was somehow being dumbed down in some sense, a focus on readability, I was reading, whatever that means, of course all put to rest by your victory. But tell us a little bit about the uproar there and what you make of the question of the awards. JULIAN BARNES: Well, every year the jury changes. Every year there is a different group of people trying to read 140 novels in a very short space of time and trying to keep their wits intact and trying to keep their judgment intact. And at the same time this group of, say, literary editors and literary experts, who without having read the 140 novels, decide that they know which one are best. And so annually there’s a sort of debate and an exchange of insults. And this time one of the jurors said — it may have been the chairwoman — what we’re looking for is readability.

And everyone went off chasing that, as if it was a word which meant dumbing down. Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike’s readable. Hawthorne’s readable. It’s a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake,” before you get a literary work that literally unreadable. So it was used as a stick to beat the jury, and you know, I deliberately didn’t read the other entries, but they all sounded honorable to me. There were one or two books that were published which I was frankly rather glad weren’t on the shortlist. Because your self-interest kicks in at a certain point. JEFFREY BROWN: Of course. JULIAN BARNES: But I think it’s become traditional for there to be a good row at Booker time, and this one didn’t really — well, it didn’t do me any harm, so I welcomed it. JEFFREY BROWN: All right. Well, the very readable and Man Booker Prize-winning novel is “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes. Thanks so much for talking to us, and again, congratulations.

JULIAN BARNES: My pleasure. Julian Barnes wins the 2011 Man Booker Prize - Telegraph Julian Barnes wins the 2011 Man Booker Prize Julian Barnes has won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novella The Sense of an Ending. By Anita Singh , Showbusiness Correspondent 10:15PM BST 18 Oct 2011 Comments He is the author who described the Booker Prize as “posh bingo”. Last night, at the fourth time of trying, Julian Barnes’s numbers finally came up. The 65-year-old writer won for The Sense of an Ending, a 150-page novella about a middle-aged man looking back on his younger days. His win was also one in the eye for critics who have derided this year’s shortlist as too low-brow. Dame Stella Rimington, chairman of the judging panel, outraged the literary establishment when she declared that she was looking for “readability”, so much so that a rival prize was announced last week to champion more high-minded fare.

The shortlist included a Western and a debut novel based on the death of Damilola Taylor, but there was no place for heavyweight authors Alan Hollinghurst or Graham Swift. However, Barnes’s elegant prose was the bookmakers’ favourite throughout, and the judges took just 31 minutes to reach their decision. Related Articles The Sense of an Ending: review 25 Jul 2011 Explaining why The Sense of an Ending won out, Dame Stella said: “We thought it was a beautifully written book, and a book that spoke to humankind in the 21st century.” She said the book “has the markings of a classic of English Literature”, describing it as “exquisitely written, subtly plotted and revealing new depths with each reading”. The protagonist, Tony Webster, is a divorcee who lives an ordered and humdrum existence, but finds his life unravelling after a lawyer’s letter causes him to revisit his school days.

Julian Barnes won for The Sense of an Ending “It is a book about somebody who appears to be at first blush a rather boring bloke, and you think, ‘Why are we reading about a very boring bloke?’ But gradually, as the book goes on, he’s revealed to be far from that,” said Dame Stella. “What this book does is unravel for us this person and who he really is, and it shows that his memory of what happened and his understanding of himself is actually quite wrong.” As for the controversy over the ‘dumbing down’ of the prize, Dame Stella appeared to have taken it in her stride. The former head of MI5, now a spy novelist, said: “I’ve had a long life in varied, different careers and I’ve been through many crises of one kind or another, against which this one pales.” Accepting the award, Barnes said: “I would like to thank the judges – who I won’t hear a word against – for their wisdom, and the sponsors for their cheque.” He declared himself “as much relieved as I am delighted” and likened himself to Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer who was considered by the Nobel Prize committee year after year but always overlooked.

Barnes said: “When asked, as he continually was, why he had never won the Nobel Prize, Borges used to reply that there was a cottage industry devoted to not giving Borges the Nobel Prize. "Over the last years, in occasional moments of mild paranoia, I have wondered whether there wasn’t some similar, sinister organisation operating over here.” Winning the award, he joked, had made him realise that the judges “are the wisest heads in literary Christendom”. Barnes triumphed 27 years after his first Booker nomination. He was shortlisted in 1984 for Flaubert’s Parrot but lost to Anita Brookner for Hotel Du Lac. England, England was nominated in 1998 but beaten by Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. Barnes was shortlisted in 1984 for Flaubert's Parrot. England, England was nominated in 1998 His 2005 novel, Arthur and George, was strongly fancied but John Banville took the prize for The Sea.

His appearance at the Guildhall ceremony to accept the £50,000 prize was a rare one – Barnes has avoided Booker-related publicity, perhaps on account of his infamous remark about the prize. “The only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo,” he said. “It drives publishers mad with hope, booksellers mad with greed, judges mad with power, winners mad with pride, and losers (the unsuccessful short-listees plus every other novelist in the country) mad with envy and disappointment.” Video: Julian Barnes wins the 2011 Man Booker Prize - Telegraph Booker Prize Julian Barnes wins the 2011 Man Booker Prize Author Julian Barnes speaks after winning the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Sense of an Ending at the Guildhall in London. 11:30PM BST 18 Oct 2011 He is the author who described the Booker Prize as “posh bingo”. Last night, at the fourth time of trying, Julian Barnes’s numbers finally came up. The 65-year-old writer won for The Sense of an Ending, a 150-page novella about a middle-aged man looking back on his younger days.

His win was also one in the eye for critics who have derided this year’s shortlist as too low-brow. At a press conference after he received the award, Barnes was asked for his take on the row prompted by Dame Stella Rimington’s remark that the judges were looking for “readability”. The argument made a false distinction between readable fiction and good fiction, he claimed. “Most great books are readable,” he said. “I don’t say I’ve written a great book but when you have read the great canon there are very few until you get to Finnegan’s Wake that you would call unreadable.” Related Content Julian Barnes - Literature Literature United Agents Biography Novelist Julian Barnes was born in Leicester on 19 January 1946 and was educated at the City of London School and Magdalen College, Oxford. After working as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, he began a career as a journalist, reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement and became a contributing editor for the New Review in 1977.

He was assistant literary editor and television critic for the New Statesman magazine (1977-81) and deputy literary editor for the Sunday Times (1980-82), before becoming television critic of The Observer, where he worked until 1986. He was London correspondent for the New Yorker magazine (1990-95). A collection of these articles were published as Letters from London 1990-95 (1995).Barnes' first novel, Metroland (1980), follows the adventures of a young man escaping English suburbia in Paris in 1968. It was followed by Before She Met Me (1982), a story of jealousy and obsession. His next book, the acclaimed Flaubert's Parrot (1984), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Narrated by a retired doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, the novel combines literary criticism, biographical digression and a tragic personal narrative as Braithwaite travels through Rouen and Croisset on the trail of the celebrated author of Madame Bovary.

Staring at the Sun (1986) narrates the life story of Jean Sergeant, from the Second World War through to the first decades of the new millennium. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) explores the relationship between art, religion and death, through a number of stories linked by images of shipwreck and survival, while Talking It Over (1991), winner of the French Prix Fémina, is the story of a triangular love affair. The Porcupine, a political novel set in Eastern Europe, was published in 1992. Cross Channel, a collection of short stories about English men and women living in France, was published in 1996 and was followed by a dark satire of contemporary English 'theme-park' culture, England, England (1998), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Arthur and George (2005) is based on the true story of a solicitor in the early twentieth century, accused of maiming cattle, and saved by the intervention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Love, etc (2000), continues the stories of the characters he created in Talking It Over.

He also used to write a series of detective thrillers under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, featuring the bisexual private-eye, Duffy. Julian Barnes' work has been successful both commercially and critically on both sides of the English Channel, and Flaubert's Parrot was awarded the Prix Médicis (France). In 1995 he was made Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France). He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1986 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the German Shakespeare Prize from the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg in 1993. In 2011 he was awarded the David Cohen British Literature Prize. His book Something to Declare: French Essays (2002), is a series of essays about French life and culture. He has also edited and translated the first English translation of the French 19th-century novelist Alphonse Daudet's In the Land of Pain (2002). The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003), was originally a series of articles for The Guardian. Julian Barnes lives in London.

His latest books are Nothing To Be Frightened Of (2008) - a memoir; Pulse (2011) - a collection of short stories; and the novels, The Sense of an Ending (2011), shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Novel Award and winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and The Noise of Time (2016). Author statement Critical perspective Julian Barnes started out as a journalist before publishing his first novel, Metroland, in 1980. Since then he has carved out a reputation as one of contemporary Britain's most brilliant and sophisticated novelists, often grouped with Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Barnes' prose is elegant, witty and playful, and he often employs techniques associated with postmodern writing - unreliable narrators, a self-conscious linguistic style, an intertextual blending of different narrative forms - which serve to foreground the process of literary creation, the gap between experience and language, and the subjectivity of 'truth' and 'reality'.

However, despite this playful experimentation with language, style and form, Barnes' fiction is also grounded in psychological realism and his themes are serious, poignant and heart-felt: he frequently addresses the nature of love, particularly its dark side, exploring humankind's capacity for jealousy, obsession and infidelity, alongside the perennial quest for authentic love. Metroland (1980) is a coming-of-age novel which explores 20th-century society in both England and France through the story of Christopher, a young English man who tries to escape his dull, middle-class suburban life by moving to Paris and emerging himself in French culture. It was followed by Before She Met Me (1982), an intense portrait of the dark side of the human heart which features a man's jealous obsession with his wife's former lovers. After these two fairly traditional linear novels, Barnes' first major success came with Flaubert's Parrot (1984), his first book to be written in an experimental, non-linear style.

A highly inventive and brilliant work, Flaubert's Parrot intertwines the realistic personal story of its protagonist, Geoffrey Braithwaite, with a wealth of literary and artistic references and a complex web of different genres and textual forms, combining fiction with biography, literary criticism, letters and other documentary texts. Braithwaite, a retired doctor, spends his time pursuing his passionate interest in the French writer, Gustave Flaubert, and Barnes' novel incorporates the fruits of Braithwaite's research, offering readers 'a brilliant, well-informed, creative exploration of the French writer's life and work, which ultimately questions the philosophical nature of all history and knowledge' (Richard Brown, Contemporary Novelists, 1991, ed. Henderson). Yet underlying this intertextual collage of literary research and biographical information about Flaubert is Braithwaite's emotionally traumatic story regarding his wife's adultery and death which, strangely, seems to echo the experiences of some of Flaubert's characters - thus creating another layer of overlapping of the many different threads of Flaubert's Parrot.

Patrick Meanor comments on the critical reaction to the experimental form of Flaubert's Parrot, in which some critics dispute whether it can actually be defined as a novel: 'Some commentators claimed that its formal structure moved beyond novelistic boundaries; it appeared to be a set of variations on different forms of discourse covering many aspects of Gustave Flaubert's life and works' (Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature, 2003, eds Serafin and Grosvenor Myer). A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) has sparked similar debates, for its structure is also experimental and complex. Beginning with Noah's Ark and ending with a scene in Heaven, it echoes Flaubert's Parrot in incorporating many different textual forms - including letters, legal documents, critical writings - to examine our construction of historical knowledge and the slippery nature of 'truth'. This richly layered work also combines its postmodern experimentation with poignant contemplations on the meaning of life and the necessity of love. Talking it Over (1991), which was followed by a sequel, Love etc.

(2000), returns to the themes of the first two novels, exploring the intensities and frustrations of male-female relationships, this time through a complicated love triangle. However,Talking it Over is more than a traditional story of the quest for love, for its structure - monologues written in turn by each of the three characters - presents three different versions of events, with each character asserting the truthfulness and validity of their own point-of-view. As such, Talking it Over, like Barnes' more experimental novels, questions and subverts the objectivity of truth, suggesting that there is no single 'correct' version, merely differing subjective viewpoints and interpretations.The acclaimed England, England (1998) satirises the virtual reality and capitalism of contemporary English culture by depicting a dystopian vision in which the modern-day tendency to experience everything in virtual terms is taken to extremes.

The Isle of Wight has been turned into a bizarre theme park, 'England, England', in which there are replicas of most of the country's major tourist attractions, historical sites and cultural artefacts, all of which embody stereotypical notions of Englishness: Big Ben, red double-decker buses, Harrods, Princess Diana's grave, and even re-enactments of the Battle of Britain and the escapades of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest. Barnes' brilliant and inventive satire is witty and hilarious, but there is a dark and serious undertone as this virtual, fantasy England begins to go horribly wrong. Parallel to this, and framing the central narrative, is the poignant personal story of the life of Martha, an employee at 'England, England', who eventually becomes exhausted and bitter as we follow her experiences from childhood to old age. A very different but equally successful work, Arthur and George (2005) is based on a true story of two very different men whose paths crossed unexpectedly: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, celebrated author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and George Edalji, a half-Indian rural solicitor who was wrongly convicted of mutilating livestock in Staffordshire.

The false accusation was thought to stem from racial prejudice and Conan Doyle stepped in to help, becoming a real-life amateur detective in order to get justice for Edalji. Arthur and George, like most of Barnes' work, is rich and multi-layered: Barnes combines his depiction of this fascinating true detective story with a vivid and well-researched chronicle of Edwardian society, as well as delving into the complicated personal life of Conan Doyle, and once again exploring the nature of love. After three previous Booker Prize for Fiction nominations (Flaubert's Parrot; England, England; Arthur and George), Barnes finally won the prestigious prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, though he had mixed feelings about the award (which he has famously called 'posh bingo'), having been pipped at the post so many times. The Sense of an Ending is a short, concise novel in which the narrator, Tony, is forced to re-evaluate his life and his sense of self-identity.

In middle-age, Tony reflects on his 1960s' schooldays with a small group of close friends, followed by university, marriage, fatherhood and a civilised divorce - all of which, it seems, amounts to a respectable life and a sense of oneself as a fairly decent person. However, a shock from the past shatters Tony's sense of middling respectability and moral uprightness, confronting him with the consequences of his thoughtless youthful behaviour and de-stabilising his perception of himself, his past and his (previously comfortable) place in the world. Like other Barnes novels, The Sense of an Ending offers a profound contemplation on the slippery and ambiguous nature of memory, history and even one's sense of self, this time through a brilliantly evocative portrait of one man's painful emotional excavation. Elizabeth O'Reilly, 2012. Somerset Maugham Award Author statement 'Writers should have the highest ambition: not just for themselves, but for the form they work in.

Flaubert once rebuked Louise Colet for having the love of art yet lacking 'the religion of art': she fancied its rituals, the vestments and the incense, but did not finally believe in its revealed truths. I am a writer for an accumulation of lesser reasons (love of words, fear of death, hope of fame, delight in creation, distaste for office hours) and for one presiding major reason: because I believe that the best art tells the most truth about life. Listen to the competing lies: to the tatty rhetoric of politics, the false promises of religion, the contaminated voices of television and journalism. Whereas the novel tells the beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truth. This is its paradox, its grandeur, its seductive dangerousness. Two famous deaths have been intermittently proclaimed for some time now: the death of God and the death of the novel. Both are exaggerated.

And since God was one of the fictional impulse's earliest and finest creations, I'll bet on the novel - in however mutated a version - to outlast even God.' Related projects: The London Book Fair: Turkey Market Focus 2013 From Twitter @LitBritish Are you following the #LitShowcase ? Read the latest commission from Andrew McMillan, published in the @NewStatesman . (1 mins ago) Julian Barnes: Books Julian Barnes The Noise of Time In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return. So begins Julian Barnes's first novel since his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. A story about the collision of Art and Power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage, it is the work of a true master. Scheduled for publication in January 2016 in the UK and later in the US and Canada.

Keeping an Eye Open 'Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation.' Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays, chiefly about French artists, which trace the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism. Levels of Life 'You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.' Julian Barnes's new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded him the 2011 Man Booker Prize described him as 'an unparalleled magus of the heart'. This book confirms that opinion.

Read More  Through the Window Seventeen essays (and one short story) As he writes in his preface, 'Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.' Read More  The Sense of an Ending Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2011 Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. Read More  Pulse Ranging from the domestic to the extraordinary, from the vineyards of Italy to the English seaside in winter, the stories in Pulse resonate and spark. The stories in Julian Barnes' long-awaited third collection are attuned to rhythms and currents: of the body, of love and sex, illness and death, connections and conversations.

Each character is bent to a pulse, propelled on by success and loss, by new beginnings and endings. Read More  Nothing to be Frightened of 'I don't believe in God, but I miss him.' Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is like a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers. Read More  Arthur & George Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction Arthur & George is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes. It is a novel about low crime and high spirituality; guilt and innocence; identity, nationality and race; and thwarted passion. Read More  The Lemon Table A collection of short stories on the nuances of life and its insurmountable end.

From the hairdressing salon where an old man measures out his life in haircuts, to the concert hall where a music lover carries out an obsessive campaign against those who cough in concerts; from the woman who reads elaborate recipes to her sick husband as a substitute for sex, to the woman 'incarcerated' in an old people's home beginning a correspondence with an author that enriches both their lives - all Barnes' characters, in their different ways, square up to death and rage against the dying light. Read More  The Pedant in the Kitchen A witty and practical account of Julian Barnes' search for gastronomic precision. It is a quest that leaves him seduced by Jane Grigson, infuriated by Nigel Slater, and reassured by Mrs Beeton's Victorian virtues. The Pedant in the Kitchen is perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook and is something that none of Julian Barnes' legion of admirers will want to miss. Read More  A collection of essays on the subject of France and French culture written by Barnes over the previous twenty years. Subjects include the Tour de France, French food, and, of course, Gustave Flaubert.

Read More  Love, etc In Talking It Over , Stuart and Oliver fought for the love of Gillian. One of them won, but what happened next? Love, etc catches up with this trio after ten years only to find more chaos and confusion. Written in the same style as the prequel, Barnes takes the form a few steps further as the characters plead for the reader's attention. Read More  England, England Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction One of Barnes's finest and funniest novels, England, England calls into question the idea of replicas, truth vs. fiction, reality vs. art, nationhood, myth-making, and self-exploration. As every schoolboy knows, you can fit the whole of England on the Isle of Wight. Grotesque, visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman takes the saying literally and does exactly that. Read More  Cross Channel A collection of short stories that explore the connections, similarities, and differences between England and France. Clever, wise, reflective and imaginative, these stories are permeated with understanding of what it has meant for generations from these islands to cross the Channel. Read More  Letters from London Barnes's first published book of non-fiction.

Barnes served as London correspondent for the New Yorker between 1990-1995, writing a series of essays under the collective title of Letters from London. Gathered here, along with a few essays published elsewhere, this collection constitutes Barnes's first published book of non-fiction. Read More  The Porcupine A startling look at the fallout from the recent transformation of Eastern Europe. Powerful and unsettling, The Porcupine is a novel about the fall of Communism and the hold it retains on its successors; about the particular uncertainties of politics in our time; and about the stubborn, disturbingly grey areas hidden in any black-and-white vision of the world. Read More  Talking It Over Bright and funny "he said/she said/he said" novel. Talking it Over is a brilliant and intimate account of love's vicissitudes. It begins as a comedy of misunderstanding, then slowly darkens and deepens, drawing us compellingly into the quagmires of the heart. Read More  A History of the World in 10½ Chapters Connecting themes of voyage and discovery.

The mixture of fictional and historical narratives provides Barnes the opportunity to question our ideas of history, our interpretation of facts, and our search for answers to explain our interaction and placement within the grand scope of history. Read More  Staring at the Sun The life of Jean Serjeant. Barnes examines the ordinary life of Jean Serjeant from her childhood in the 1920s through her adulthood to the year 2021. Throughout her life, Jean learns to question the world's idea of truth while she explores the beauty and miracles of everyday life. Read More  Flaubert's Parrot Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction Barnes's "breakthrough" novel about an English doctor's obsession with Gustave Flaubert and his use of Flaubert's writings to make sense of his own life. Read More  Before She Met Me The novel is gritty, shocking, and quite moving in its portrayal of the slow deterioration of its central character. Barnes's second book under his own name. Graham Hendrick divorces, remarries, and finds himself consumed with jealousy as he investigates his new wife's former love affairs.

Read More  Metroland Winner Somerset Maugham Award for a First Novel Metroland was Julian Barnes's first novel. It took between 7-8 years to write and draws heavily on his personal experiences growing up in the suburbs of London. Read More 

Question: What is the title of the novel which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for Julian Barnes?
Answer: The Sense of an Ending