Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English essayist, novelist and short story writer.
After completing his education, Barnes spent three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement. His first work of fiction – Metroland – was published in 1980, with his second – Before She Met Me – following two years later. Flaubert's Parrot was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, was a finalist for the 1988 Grinzane Cavour Prize, and won both the 1985 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the 1986 Prix Médicis Essai. Barnes published Staring at the Sun and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters later the same decade.
Talking It Over – published in 1991 – won the 1992 Prix Femina étranger, and was followed nine years later by a sequel titled Love, etc, in between which the short story collection Cross Channel and two longer works – The Porcupine and England, England – appeared. Arthur & George was shortlisted for both the 2005 Booker Prize and 2007 Dublin Literary Award, while The Sense of an Ending won the former prize in 2011. Two further short story collections – The Lemon Table and Pulse – were published in 2004 and 2011 respectively.
Among Barnes's later works of fiction were The Noise of Time, The Only Story and Elizabeth Finch. To coincide with his 80th birthday in January 2026 he published Departure(s), saying it would be his last book. Alongside his fictional work – he wrote four works of crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh – he has published several essay collections, as well as two memoirs and the nonfiction book, The Man in the Red Coat – about people of Belle Époque Paris in the arts. He also translated In the Land of Pain from French into English.
Appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004, his other honours include the 1986 E. M. Forster Award, the 1993 Shakespeare Prize, the 2004 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2016 Siegfried Lenz Prize and the 2021 Jerusalem Prize. He has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Barnes was born in Leicester, in the East Midlands of England, on 19 January 1946, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards. The younger brother of philosopher Jonathan Barnes, both of their parents were French teachers. Barnes said his support for Leicester City Football Club was – aged four or five – "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city. At the age of 10, Barnes's mother told her son he had "too much imagination".
In 1956, the family moved to Northwood, Middlesex, the 'Metro-land' of his first novel. He went to the City of London School from 1957 until 1964, then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied modern languages. After graduating, he spent three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement, specialising in "sports and dirty words". He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, about which he said: "When there were weekly meetings I would be paralysed into silence, and was thought of as the mute member of staff." He was a television critic between 1979 and 1986, beginning with the New Statesman and continuing with The Observer.
Barnes works – among his books and papers – on an IBM 196c electric typewriter in a study containing a large desk with three sides. He had to replace his original typewriter in 2023 when no one in Britain could repair it. A Hungarian wrote him a letter with news of an unused and working replacement IBM 196C for him.
Barnes's first novel – Metroland – was published in 1980. It is the story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who – as a student – travels to Paris, France, finally returning to London. The novel deals with themes of idealism and sexual fidelity, and has the three-part structure that is a common recurrence in Barnes's work. After reading the novel, Barnes's mother complained about the book's "bombardment" of filth.
His second novel, Before She Met Me (1982), features a darker narrative, a story of revenge by a jealous historian who becomes obsessed with the past of his second wife. Barnes's breakthrough novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), departed from the traditional linear structure of his previous novels and featured a fragmentary biographical-style story of an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who focuses obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert. About Flaubert, Barnes has said, "he's the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh, who I think has spoken the most truth about writing." Flaubert's Parrot was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and helped to establish Barnes as a serious literary figure; the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was a finalist for the 1988 Grinzane Cavour Prize, and won both the 1985 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the 1986 Prix Médicis Essai. His publisher would later gift him one of Gustave Flaubert's original letters when Barnes surpassed paperback sales of one million of all his works. When researching Flaubert's Parrot, Barnes found a notebook by Alphonse Daudet in Oxford's Taylorian library; he later spent a great deal of time translating and editing it, and it was published in 2002 as In the Land of Pain.
In 1986, Barnes published Staring at the Sun, a novel about a woman growing to maturity in postwar England and dealing with issues of love, truth, and mortality. In 1989, he published A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a nonlinear novel using a variety of writing styles to call into question perceived notions of human history and knowledge itself.
In 1991, Barnes published Talking It Over, a novel about a contemporary love triangle, in which the three characters take turns to talk to the reader, reflecting on common events. A sequel – Love, etc – revisited the characters ten years on; this was published in 2000. Between the two there was The Porcupine – a novel published in 1992 – which again deals with a historical theme, this time depicting the trial of Stoyo Petkanov – the former leader of a collapsed Communist country in Eastern Europe – as he stands trial for crimes against his country. The 1998 humorous novel England, England explores the idea of national identity through the entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman's decision to create a theme park on the Isle of Wight that resembles some of England's tourist spots. It contained a reference to the UK leaving the European Union, which Barnes was asked about after Brexit. Barnes – a keen Francophile – also published Cross Channel, a collection of 10 stories charting Britain's relationship with France. He would return to the topic of France in Something to Declare, a collection of essays on French subjects published in 2002.
In 2003, Barnes undertook a rare acting role as the voice of Georges Simenon in a BBC Radio 4 series of adaptations of Inspector Maigret stories. Arthur & George (2005) – a fictional account of a true crime that was investigated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – made the 2007 Dublin Literary Award shortlist.
Barnes's 11th novel, The Sense of an Ending, was published by Jonathan Cape on 4 August 2011. In October of that year, it was awarded the Booker Prize. The judges took 31 minutes to come to their decision, with head judge Stella Rimington saying it was a "beautifully written book" and that the panel thought it "spoke to humankind in the 21st Century." Though Barnes was present at the ceremony, he had stayed away from publicity surrounding the prize, which The Daily Telegraph attributed to his previous comment that "The only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo. It drives publishers mad with hope, booksellers mad with greed, judges mad with power, winners mad with pride, and losers (the unsuccessful short-listees plus every other novelist in the country) mad with envy and disappointment". Barnes's "posh bingo" remark dates from 1987, but was still remembered decades afterwards. The Sense of an Ending also won the 2012 Europese Literatuurprijs and was on the 2011 Costa Book Awards shortlist.