Before his Booker win, Julian Barnes defined dirty words for the Oxford dictionary
Julian Barnes spent three years compiling entries for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement, with sport and rude words as his speciality. He later became a novelist who won the Booker Prize, wrote crime fiction under a false name, and still types every book on an IBM electric typewriter.
Barnes was born in Leicester on 19 January 1946, though the family left for London's outer suburbs when he was six weeks old. His parents both taught French, and his older brother Jonathan became a philosopher. As a small boy he chose to follow Leicester City as a sentimental link to the city he had barely known. At ten, his mother warned that he had too much imagination. In 1956 the family settled in Northwood, Middlesex, a commuter district that would give his debut novel its title.
After the City of London School he read modern languages at Magdalen College, Oxford. The dictionary job came next, then reviewing and literary editing at the New Statesman and the New Review. He was painfully shy at the Statesman, so silent in weekly meetings that colleagues regarded him as the office mute. From 1979 to 1986 he reviewed television, first for the Statesman and later for The Observer.
Metroland appeared in 1980: a suburban young man goes to Paris as a student and comes home again, in a three-part shape Barnes often returns to. His mother objected to what she saw as a barrage of filth. Flaubert's Parrot was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker and won France's Prix Médicis Essai. Arthur & George was shortlisted in 2005, and The Sense of an Ending finally took the Booker in 2011. France honoured him three times in the Order of Arts and Letters, rising to Commandeur in 2004, and he received the Jerusalem Prize in 2021. His name has been floated for the Nobel.
Alongside the literary novels he wrote four crime books as Dan Kavanagh, plus essays, two memoirs and The Man in the Red Coat, about artistic life in Belle Époque Paris. In 2023 his old typewriter broke and nobody in Britain could mend it; a Hungarian correspondent tracked down an unused IBM 196C for him. Departure(s), timed to his 80th birthday in January 2026, is the book he says will be his last.
Source: Julian Barnes
