Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes (born January 19, 1946, Leicester, England) is a British critic and author of inventive and intellectual novels about obsessed characters curious about the past. His most well-known novel is the award-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011). He has also published many works of literary criticism and essay collections. In 2026 he published what he has said is his final novel, Departure(s).

Early career

Barnes attended Magdalen College, Oxford (B.A., 1968), and worked for three years as a lexicographer on a new supplement of The Oxford English Dictionary. He began contributing reviews to the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman in the 1970s while publishing thrillers under his Dan Kavanagh pseudonym. (His pseudonym’s surname was borrowed from the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, whom he married in 1979.) These books—which include Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981), Putting the Boot In (1985), and Going to the Dogs (1987)—feature a protagonist named Duffy, a bisexual ex-cop turned private detective.

Novels and short stories

The first novel published under Barnes’s own name was the coming-of-age story Metroland (1980). Jealous obsession moves the protagonist of Before She Met Me (1982) to scrutinize his new wife’s past. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Barnes’s breakthrough novel, is a humorous mixture of biography, fiction, and literary criticism as a scholar becomes obsessed with the 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert and with the stuffed parrot that Flaubert used as inspiration in writing the short story “Un Coeur simple.” The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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Barnes’s later novels include A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (1989), Talking It Over (1991), The Porcupine (1992), and Cross Channel (1996). In the satirical England, England (1998), Barnes skewers modern England in his portrayal of a theme park on the Isle of Wight, complete with the royal family, the Tower of London, Robin Hood, and pubs.

Critics thought Barnes showed a new depth of emotion in The Lemon Table (2004), a collection of short stories in which most of the characters are consumed by thoughts of death. He explores why some people are remembered after their death and others are not in the historical novel Arthur & George (2005), in which one of the title characters is based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 2011 Barnes published Pulse, a collection of short stories, as well as The Sense of an Ending, a Booker Prize-winning novel that uses an unreliable narrator to explore the subjects of memory and aging. The latter focuses on a divorced man in his 60s who unexpectedly inherits money from the mother of his college girlfriend. The event inspires him to revisit the past, including his failed relationship with the young woman. It was adapted into a film in 2017.

The Noise of Time (2016) fictionalizes episodes from the life of Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich. In The Only Story (2018), Barnes explores memory and first love as a man looks back on his relationship with an older woman. In 2022 he published Elizabeth Finch, which centers on a man whose intellectual crush on one of his teachers has a lasting impact on his life.

In 2020 Barnes was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer that is incurable but treatable, and he began undergoing chemotherapy. In 2026 he released what he said would be his last novel. Titled Departure(s), it blends fiction and memoir and centers on a writer named Julian who has cancer. Interwoven with the narrator’s thoughts on mortality and aging is his tale of the relationship between two of his college friends, whom he had introduced to each other.

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Nonfiction works

Barnes’s nonfiction work includes Something to Declare (2002), a collection of essays about France and French culture; The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003), which explores his love of food; Through the Window (2012), an exploration of his literary influences; and Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (2015). Barnes used the story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi to explore Belle Époque Paris in The Man in the Red Coat (2019).

Barnes’s memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) is an honest, oftentimes jarringly critical look at his relationship with his parents and older brother. Levels of Life (2013)—which pays tribute to his wife, who died of a brain tumor in 2008—is a series of linked essays. In 2025 Barnes published Changing My Mind, which makes a case for the benefits of open-mindedness. The loosely connected essays discuss such topics as books, politics, and Barnes’s post-college tenure at The Oxford English Dictionary.