On this date in 1946, Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England. He attended the City of London School, and graduated from Magdalen College in 1968 with a degree in modern languages. He became a reviewer and editor for the New Statesman and New Review in 1977 and worked as a television critic for the New Statesman from 1979-86.
Barnes has published 19 novels (four under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh) and 10 nonfiction works as of this writing. “The Sense of an Ending” won the 2011 Booker Prize. Following were “The Noise of Time” (2016), “The Only Story” (2018) and “The Man in the Red Coat” (2019).
Barnes married literary agent Pat Kavanagh in 1979 and was widowed in 2011 after she died of a brain tumor just 37 days after being diagnosed. He is the author of “Nothing to be Frightened Of,” a 2008 memoir focusing on death and mortality. “I don’t believe in God but I miss him,” Barnes proclaimed in the opening sentence. He is a UK Patron of Dignity in Dying.
In his memoir he called himself an atheist turned agnostic: “I had no faith to lose. I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life.” And though he thinks the Christian religion is “a beautiful lie,” he misses the sense of purpose and belief that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses.
Barnes was diagnosed in 2020 with a rare blood cancer called myeloproliferative neoplasm that is described as “treatable but exhausting.” He announced in 2026 that his new novel “Departure(s)” would be his last. He married Rachel Cugnoni, 18 years his junior and his former publisher at Vintage, in 2025 just shy of his 80th birthday.
PHOTO: Barnes in 2019. CC 4.0
