Julian Barnes awarded Man Booker prize for fiction

Added by Erik West on October 19, 2011

British author Julian Barnes was awarded the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday at a dinner at London’s Guildhal for his book “The Sense Of An Ending”, published by Jonathon Cape.

Barnes’ book, at 150 pages, is a story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past. The prize announcement said, in part, “Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.”

Barnes received the award, beating out two Canadian authors’ books – Patrick deWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers” and Stephen Kelman’s “Pigeon English”.

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester in January 1946. He has written nine novels, including “Flaubert’s Parrot”, which was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize. Barnes’ books were shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 1984, 1998, and 2005.

The Man Booker Prize, one of the English-speaking world’s highest-profile literary awards, was founded in 1969 and is sponsored by financial services firm Man Group PLC. The award is open to authors from the 54-nation Commonwealth of former British colonies including Australia and Canada.

A proposed and competing prize called the “Literature Prize” may, in the future, be open to novels by American authors, for the best novel written in the English language and published in the UK in a given year, according to the group that created the prize – “The Advisory Board of the Literature Prize”.