Julian Barnes is tonight (Tuesday 18 October) named the winner of this year’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for The Sense of an Ending, published by Jonathan Cape.

London-based Barnes has been the bookies’ favourite to win since the shortlist announcement on 6 September. The source of the description of the prize as ‘posh bingo’, Barnes has been shortlisted three times in the past for Arthur and George (2005), England, England (1998) and Flaubert’s Parrot (1984).

Barnes’ first novel for six years, The Sense of an Ending went straight into the bestseller list on publication. 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. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, this is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers. At the time of the shortlist announcement, 2011 judge Gaby Wood commented: ‘that the tragedy trapped in this mundane life should be so moving, and so keenly felt by the character that he can only confront it half-blindly and in fragments, is the mark of a truly masterful novel.’

The Sense of an Ending is the eighth Man Booker Prize winner to be published by Jonathan Cape, a Random House imprint. (…)

Julian Barnes is the author of ten previous novels, three books of short stories and three collections of journalism. Now 65, his work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In France he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Médicis (for Flaubert’s Parrot) and the Prix Femina (for Talking it Over). He was awarded 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 (2005), England, England (1998) and Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). He lives in London.

See: The Man Booker Prize

Also see: The Guardian