Julian Barnes Wins the Man Booker Prize

By JULIE BOSMAN

Published: October 18, 2011,

The novelist Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night for “The Sense of an Ending,” a slim and meditative story of mortality, frustration and regret.

“The Sense of an Ending,” published in the United States by Knopf, part of Random House, is Mr. Barnes’s 11th novel, a 163-page book that has sometimes been called a novella for its size and simplicity. Mr. Barnes, 65, who lives in London, has been nominated for the Booker three times in the past.

The prize, Britain’s best-known literary award, is given annually to a novel by an author in Britain, Ireland or one of the Commonwealth nations. The award is accompanied by a check for £50,000, or about $78,000, and comes with an immediate lift in book sales and visibility.

The chairwoman of the judging panel, Stella Rimington, a former chief of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, said in a statement that Mr. Barnes’s novel “has the markings of a classic of English literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading.”

Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said the book “manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story. We not only want to find out how Mr. Barnes’s narrator, Tony Webster, has rewritten his own history — and discover what actually happened some 40 years ago — but also understand why he has needed to do so.”

The Booker selection brings an annual hand-wringing over the state of the award. This year, publishers and critics worried aloud that the prize had lost its literary merit in favor of commercial viability and readability. The Booker judges were criticized for their shortlist and for their public comments that they were looking for “readable” and “enjoyable” books, rather than those that would be bought and then placed on a shelf only to be admired.

…

Mr. Barnes, the author of “Flaubert’s Parrot” and “Love, etc.,” was easily the best-known name of the shortlisted authors, especially in Britain, and was widely viewed as overdue for winning the Booker. In addition to his fiction, Mr. Barnes has written short stories and several collections of journalism.

In the days leading up to the ceremony, bookmakers in Britain had decisively chosen Mr. Barnes as the likely winner, but past predictions have proved unreliable. Some suggested that the judging panel would be unlikely to pick Mr. Barnes because of his dismissive attitude toward the award in the past (he once referred to the Booker as “posh bingo”).

If his book sales resemble those of previous Booker winners, like Howard Jacobson, Hilary Mantel and Kiran Desai, Mr. Barnes will see a boost in both Britain and the United States.

In September, when the book was chosen for the Booker shortlist, Knopf moved up the publication date from January to Oct. 5.

On Tuesday evening, Knopf took more steps to prepare for increased interest. Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, said the publisher had already shipped 23,000 copies but planned to print 25,000 more quickly.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 19, 2011, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Novelist Julian Barnes Wins the Man Booker Prize.

Appendix 5

Samples of book reviews