Born in Leicester, England, in 1946, Julian Barnes
is the author of three books of stories, books of essays, a translation
of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain, and numerous novels.
His recent publications include Pulse,
a collection of short stories, and The
Sense of an Ending, winner of the 2011
Man Booker Prize.
In France, he is the only writer to have won both the
Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 2004 he became
a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In England his
honors include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial
Prize. He has also received the E. M. Forster Award from the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the San Clemente literary
prize. In 2011 he was awarded the David
Cohen Prize for Literature. Awarded biennially, the prize honours
a lifetime’s achievement in literature for a writer in the English
language who is a citizen of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland.
He lives in London.
Praise for The Sense of an Ending:
"Its effect is disturbing – all the more
so for being written with Barnes’s habitual lucidity. His reputation
will surely be enhanced by this book. Do not be misled by its brevity.
Its mystery is as deeply embedded as the most archaic of memories."
-- Anita
Brookner
"Julian Barnes' The
Sense of an Ending has the markings of a classic of English Literature.
It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with
each reading." -- Dame Stella Rimington, Chair of the 2011 judges
Julian Barnes on Sibelius's Home, Ainola
Julian
Barnes explores the house where Sibelius lived, died, wrote
much of his music—and spent decades not writing, or not
publishing ...
"There are two famous silences in the
history of classical music: those of Rossini and Sibelius.
Rossini’s, which lasted nearly 40 years, was a worldly,
cosmopolitan silence, much of it spent in Paris, during which
time he co-invented tournedos Rossini. Sibelius’s, which
lasted nearly 30 years, was more austere, self-punishing and
site-specific; and whereas Rossini finally yielded again to
music, writing the late works he referred to as “the
sins of my old age”, Sibelius was implacable. He fell
silent, and remained silent."
The Sense of an Ending
Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize
The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable
past, Julian Barnes's new novel is laced with his trademark precision,
dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world's most
distinguished writers.
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. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious
than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore
to stay friends forever. Until Adrian's life took a turn into
tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did
their best to forget.
Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career
and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks,
with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He's
certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect.
It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about
to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads
Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky.
And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to
upset all your vaunted truths?
Designing the Cover Art for The Sense of an Ending
Suzanne Dean, Creative Director at Vintage
Publishing, discusses her process for designing the cover
of Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending.
The video shows numerous examples from
her earliest design thoughts through the final cover.
Suzanne Dean also designed the jacket for Julian Barnes's
recent collection of short stories Pulse.
Freedom from Torture
Julian Barnes's one public event this year
found him in conversation with the biographer
Hermione Leeabout his Man Booker Prize-winning novel The
Sense of an Ending.
Summaries of the exchange are available from
the Telegraph
and the New
Yorker:
Lauren Collins. "An
Evening with Julian Barnes." The New Yorker
(Blog) 12 December 2011. [Note: Collins misheard Barnes as
saying 'moral error'. The corrected phrase should run, "I
start with a situation, a moral area, and then I ask
who it happens to."]
Every penny raised was donated to the charity
Freedom from Torture,
so please visit their website and consider supporting them in
the future (www.freedomfromtorture.org).
For 25 years, Freedom from Torture has been helping torture
survivors in the UK rebuild their lives. Julian Barnes is a
patron of the charity.
Pulse
From the Publisher:
After the best-selling Arthur & George
and Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes returns
with fourteen stories about longing and loss, friendship and
love, whose mysterious natures he examines with his trademark
wit and observant eye.
From an imperial capital in the eighteenth
century to Garibaldi’s adventures in the nineteenth,
from the vineyards of Italy to the English seaside in our
time, he finds the “stages, transitions, arguments”
that define us. A newly divorced real estate agent can’t
resist invading his reticent girlfriend’s privacy, but
the information he finds reveals only his callously shallow
curiosity. A couple come together through an illicit cigarette
and a song shared over the din of a Chinese restaurant. A
widower revisiting the Scottish island he’d treasured
with his wife learns how difficult it is to purge oneself
of grief. And throughout, friends gather regularly at dinner
parties and perfect the art of cerebral, sometimes bawdy banter
about the world passing before them. Whether
domestic or extraordinary, each story pulses with the resonance,
spark, and poignant humor for which Barnes is justly heralded.
'All the stories
in Pulse have the absolute
completeness and density of the very best short fiction.'
-- Kate Saunders, New Statesman
The David Cohen Prize for Literature 2011
The David Cohen Prize for Literature 2011 has
been awarded to the English novelist, essayist and short story
writer Julian Barnes for his lifetime’s achievement in
literature. Visit
the award website for more information and visit the Front
Row website to listen to an interview with Julian Barnes
and Mark Lawson.
Julian Barnes is one of England’s foremost
fiction writers. Shortlisted on three occasions for the Man
Booker Prize (for Flaubert’s Parrot, England, England,
and Arthur and George), he is as lauded overseas as in his homeland.
The French Ministry of Culture named him Commandeur de l'Ordre
des Arts et des Lettres in 2004 and he has also been awarded
the Austrian State Prize for Literature.
On winning the Prize Julian Barnes said:
‘The measure of a literary award's value
lies in its list of previous winners. Over the last 18 years
the David Cohen Prize has established itself as the greatest
honour a British or Irish writer can receive within these
islands. It is also conducted with proper secrecy and dignity.
So it is a matter of sober delight to be added to the list
of prize-winners.’
Mark Lawson, chair of judges, said of this
year’s winner:
‘The David Cohen Prize is in effect
a UK version of the Nobel Prize for Literature, open to writers
of fiction and non-fiction, comedy and tragedy. Within those
divisions, there are writers who are most efficient at prose
or dialogue, structure or style, narrative or character, plot
or ideas, novels or short stories. What is remarkable about
Julian Barnes is that he has excelled in all these areas:
from the combination of literary criticism and fiction in
Flaubert's Parrot, through the structural daring of the multiple
narratives in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
to the historical faction of Arthur and George and the essayistic
reflection on faith and mortality in Nothing To Be Frightened
Of. The already extraordinary list of David Cohen Prize-winning
authors has been fittingly extended.’
Conversations
with Julian Barnes collects eighteen interviews,
conducted over nearly three decades, by journalists and correspondents
throughout the world with Julian Barnes, the author of such
highly praised novels as Flaubert's Parrot and Arthur
& George. The interviews collectively address the entirety
of Barnes's varied works and provide readers the most vivid
portrait yet of contexts and influences behind his ten novels,
his short stories, and his essays. The interviews focus not
only on the author's fiction but also on his essays, translations,
and pseudonymous writings. Barnes's evolving understanding of
the themes developed in his works (history, truth, love, art,
and death), his views on the art of the writing process, and
the role of authors in contemporary society are also discussed
at length.
About the Editors: Vanessa
Guignery is assistant professor of British literature at
the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne and the author of The
Fiction of Julian Barnes. Ryan Roberts is a librarian
at Lincoln Land Community College. He also maintains the official
websites of Julian Barnes and Ian
McEwan.
Peter Childs's Julian Barnes is
a comprehensive introductory overview of the novels that
situates Barnes's work in terms of fabulation and memory,
irony and comedy. It pursues a
broadly chronological line through Barnes's literary career,
but along the way it also shows how certain key thematic
preoccupations and obsessions seem to tie Barnes's oeuvre
together (love, death, art, history, truth, and memory).
Chapters provide detailed reading of each major publication
in turn while treating the major concerns of Barnes’s
fiction, including art, authorship, history, love and
religion. The book is very lucidly written, and it is
also satisfyingly comprehensive - alongside the 'canonical'
Barnes texts, it includes brief but illuminating discussion
of the crime fiction that Barnes has published under the
pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. This detailed study of fictions
of Julian Barnes from Metroland to Arthur &
George also benefits from archival research into his
unpublished materials.
Julian Barnes is one of the most admired
British writers of his generation. Although known primarily
as a novelist and essayist, the ‘chameleon of British
letters’ has written with distinction across the
widest range of literary genres. Both he and his diverse
and distinguished body of work have been awarded numerous
literary prizes both in the UK and abroad. This critical
guide provides a wide range of current critical perspectives
on Barnes's work from best-selling novels of the 1980s,
Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the
World in 10½ Chapters, up to his recent memoir
Nothing to be Frightened of. Including contributions
by some of the finest critics working in the contemporary
field, it reflects the richness and diversity of one of
Britain's greatest living writers.
