Biography                                                                                                            Wikipedia: Julian Barnes

Julian Patrick Barnes


Barnes as Francophile and Francophone in Bernard Pivot's Double je (France 2, March 2005)

Pseudonym:

Dan Kavanagh (crime fiction), Edward Pygge

Born:

19 January 1946 (1946--) (age 61)
Leicester, United Kingdom

Occupation:

Novelist

Nationality:

Flag of the United Kingdom United Kingdom

Genres:

Fictional prose

Influences:

Gustave Flaubert, Frank O'Connor

Website:

Official Website of Julian Barnes

                                                                                                                                  

 

Julian Patrick Barnes (born January 19, 1946 in Leicester, England) is a contemporary English writer of postmodernism in literature. He has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize (Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005)). He has written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.

Personal life

Following an education at the City of London School and Merton College, Oxford, he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. Subsequently, he worked as a literary editor and film critic. He now writes full-time. His brother, Jonathan Barnes is a philosopher specializing in ancient philosophy.

He lives in London with his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh.

Career

Barnes is a devoted Francophile and his writing reflects his long standing immersion in French literary culture. His first novel, Metroland, is a short, semi-autobiographical story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels to Paris as a student for sexual awakening. In 1983, his second novel Before She Met Me features a darker narrative, a story of revenge by a jealous historian who becomes obsessed by his second wife's past. Barnes's breakthrough novel Flaubert's Parrot broke with the traditional linear structure of his previous novels and featured a fragmentary biographical style story of an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who tries to rationalise his wife's suicide by focusing obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert, and a stuffed parrot that reputedly sat on his writing desk. The novel was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and it established Barnes as one of the pre-eminent writers of his generation. Staring at the Sun followed in 1986, another ambitious novel about a woman growing to maturity in post-war England who deals with issues of love, truth and mortality. In 1989 Barnes published A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, which was also a non linear novel, which uses a variety of writing styles to call into question the perceived notions of human history and knowledge itself.

Barnes reverted after that to smaller scale novels. In 1991, he published Talking it Over a contemporary love triangle, told in a he said/she said perspective with different characters reflecting over common events.

 

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Biography  [2]   [3]   [4] 

Books [1]  [2]

Articles  [1]  [2]  [3]  [4]  [5]  [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

Quotes

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Creada: 28/10/2008 Última Actualización: 28/10/2008

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