Barry Unsworth: The novelist who used the past to mirror our human condition
In short: Born into a family of coal miners, Barry Unsworth escaped a life underground to become a master of historical fiction. By shifting his focus from the contemporary scene to distant eras, he found a way to strip away modern clutter and explore timeless truths about greed, morality, and the human spirit.
Barry Unsworth was born in 1930 in a mining village in County Durham, England. His father, who had entered the mines at age 12, eventually moved the family into the insurance business, sparing Unsworth from the generational cycle of mining. After graduating from the University of Manchester in 1951, Unsworth spent years teaching and traveling across France, Greece, and Turkey. These experiences deeply influenced his early work, including his first novel, The Partnership, published in 1966.
Unsworth did not turn to historical fiction until his sixth novel, Pascali's Island (1980). He felt that as an expatriate, he lacked the necessary nuance to capture contemporary British life. By setting his stories in the past, he could use history as a distant mirror to examine the human condition without the distraction of modern surface clutter. He famously rejected the label of historical fiction as a blunt instrument, arguing that any novel should be judged by its ability to convey a sense of life and touch the reader's heart, regardless of its setting.
His masterpiece, Sacred Hunger (1992), explored the Atlantic slave trade and the destructive nature of the profit motive. The novel shared the Booker Prize that year with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Unsworth's approach was never about historical minutiae, such as the number of buttons on a waistcoat; instead, he sought to capture the spirit of the age and the experiences of ordinary people living on the margins of history. Throughout his career, he moved away from the baroque, high-spirited style of his early work toward a more precise, sparing use of language.
Unsworth continued to write until the end of his life, publishing his final book, The Quality of Mercy, in 2011. He died in 2012 in Perugia, Italy, at the age of 81. As noted by Cynthia Crossen in the Wall Street Journal, while his contemporary Ray Bradbury was known for inventing the future, Unsworth was celebrated for his unique ability to invent the past.
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