JULIAN BARNES
British novelist and critic who was born in January 19, in 1946 in Leicester, a fact that still appears on the back of his books, though the family moved to London when he was six weeks old. Both his parents were schoolteachers; his brother is a philosophy professor at the University of Geneva. Barnes studied Russian at school and at Oxford.
Eighteen years after Julian Barens is the author of many brilliant diverse novels, and a great deal of firt-rate journalism. So it's barens novels that have made him famous, not just in this country but all around the world. He's one of the writers who have earned England its international reputation for contemporay literature.
He's best known for the novel Flaubert's Parrot (1984), the chronicle of an ederly English doctor's obsession of the trivia of Gustave Flaubert life, and a richly symbolic examination of the ways in which art and life mesh or do not.In that book he wrote thar seizing the past is like attempting to grasp hold of a greased piglet.
After graduation with honors from Oxford University in 1968, Barnes worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. Since 1972 he has devote his full time to writing and editing, including sints and television critic for the New Statesman and the London Observer, contributing editor of New Review, and deputy literary editor of the London Sunday Times. Since 1990, Barnes has written "Letter from London" for the New Yorker.
Flaubert's Parrot was nominated for England's prestigious Booker Prize, and in 1986 Barnes received an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, for work of distinction.
Other novels include Metroland (1980), Staring at the Sun (1986), and the Porcupine (1992), and also, his last novel England, England, shorlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize for Fiction and the 1999 W H Smith Literay Award. Under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, he was written several mystery novels:Duffy (1980) and Going to the Dogs (1986) among them.
He considers himself as a middle-class English writer who loves France but doesn't hve a house there. Some of his intellectual points of reference are French rather than English. As he said on an interview, there is a possibly higher proportion of non-fiction in his fiction than in other people's fiction.