SENSE OF AN ENDING BY JULIAN BARNES WINS MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2011

Julian Barnes with his Man Booker Prize 2011 winning book Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes, 65 year old British author,  is the winner of this year's £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his book 'The Sense of an Ending', published by Jonathan Cape. Chair of the 2011 judges, Dame Stella Rimington, made the announcement at London's medieval Guildhall, during the Awards Dinner yesterday, October 18. Jon Aisbitt, Chairman of Man, presented Julian Barnes with a cheque for £50,000. 

Man Booker Prize website describe 'The Sense of an Ending', a 150 page novel,  as a truly wonderful novel that will have the reader immersed in the story from the very first page, and all the while, marvelling at the precision of Barnes’ prose.  It is the story of a seemingly ordinary man who, when revisiting his past in later life, discovers that the memories he holds are less than perfect. Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths? The Sense of an Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, this is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers.

Julian Barnes lives in London; he is the author of ten novels, three books of short stories and three collections of journalism. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In France, he won both the Prix Médicis (for Flaubert's Parrot) and the Prix Femina (for Talking it Over), the only writer to have won both prizes.  He is an officer of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2004 and the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2011 for his lifetime achievement in literature. Julian Barnes has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times previously, for Arthur and George in 2005, England, England in 1998 and Flaubert's Parrot in 1984.

Asked what he would spend the £50,000 prize money on, Barnes said a new watch strap was first on his list. "I could buy a whole new watch."