Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes, born in 1946, English writer, who is best known for his novel Flaubert's Parrot (1984). He is also known in the United States for his frequent columns in the New Yorker magazine, “Letters from London,” which have been compiled as a book with the same title (1995).

Barnes was born in Leicester, England, and studied French at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He worked as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary (1969-1971) before becoming a freelance journalist. He has worked as an assistant literary editor for the New Review (1977-1979) and the Sunday Times (1980-1982), and as a television critic for the New Statesman (1977-1981) and the Observer (1982-1986).

His first novel, Metroland (1980), won a Somerset Maugham award (a British award to encourage young British writers to travel abroad) and was followed by Before She Met Me (1982), a comic story of marital paranoia with an unexpectedly dark outcome. The work that established Barnes's reputation was Flaubert's Parrot. In the novel, the protagonist, a doctor, seems to write about French novelist Gustave Flaubert, yet as the story develops it becomes clear that the doctor is actually trying to come to terms with his wife's suicide. The novel was enormously popular in France. In 1986 it became the first book by an English author to win the prestigious Prix Médicis, a French literary prize. Barnes was also recognized with the French honorary title of Officier de l'Orde des Arts et des Lettres.

Barnes's successful novel A History of the World in 10y Chapters (1989) consists of a series of short stories, ranging from a narrative by a woodworm irreverently revising the biblical account of Noah's ark, to an interpretation of the famous painting The Raft of the Medusa by French artist Théodore Gericault, to a fantasy about heaven. Common themes—sea voyages, the damned and the saved, the nature of love—are developed and played upon in the different stories. Other works by Barnes include Staring at the Sun (1988), Talking it Over (1991), The Porcupine (1992), Love Etc (1992), Cross Channel (1996), and England, England (1999). A collection of essays about France, Something to Declare, appeared in 2002.

Barnes is married to Pat Cavanaugh, a literary agent, and he has published four mystery novels under the pseudonym Dan Cavanaugh. He has taught creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and continues to publish short fiction and essays in literary magazines.