For people far from literature, it is completely incomprehensible how they become writers. Indeed - why people start to write; Why do they need to share with people what they think, what they dream about and what they are worried about? Nobody knows the answer to this yet.
And if someone asked this question to the English prose writer Julian Barnes, he would hardly be able to answer it. A writer simply cannot help but transfer his feelings and impressions of life to paper, that's all. The main thing is that someone needs it.
Julian Barnes is lucky in this regard - he is read, his works are discussed and filmed. He also won several literary awards.
Biography
Julian Patrick Barnes was born in 1946 in Leicester, which is located near London. His parents were both French teachers, so the atmosphere in the house was humanitarian. Since childhood, the son of the Barnes was distinguished by a violent imagination, which he was told about more than once. However, no one suspected that this is the property of a real writer. Moreover, Julian himself did not show any interest in literary activity for a long time. Although he read a lot and was familiar with the classics of Russian literature. For example, he did not understand why Ilya Oblomov, the hero of Goncharov's novel Oblomov, was a negative character. It's so nice to lie on the couch!
However, he studied well at school, and after graduation he entered Oxford, where he studied Russian and French languages and literature.
Despite the fact that in his youth Julian was very shy, he decided on a very daring trip to the USSR. In 1965, he and a group of friends traveled across Europe to Moscow. They rented a small bus and took it on a trip. First, France was on their way, then Germany, then they went to Poland, Brest and Minsk. At night, they spent the night in tents, cooked food on a fire - they led the life of real travelers.
After spending a little time in Moscow, they went to Leningrad, then on their way were Kharkov, Kiev and Odessa. They really liked these wonderful cities. They returned home through Romania.
This journey could not but impress an impressionable young man: everything that he saw and experienced, he wrote down in the form of travel notes. He also brought many photographs with him.
In general, Barnes loved travel, and subsequently traveled to France more than once to practice French and see the beauty of the southern country. Here he often disappeared in museums, where he completely fell in love with painting and wandered through the halls for hours, absorbing this beauty.
Educated at Oxford, Barnes worked for some time in various media as a journalist, and at the same time wrote his first works.
Literary career
Early in his career, Barnes published detective stories under the pseudonym "Dan Kavanagh". They were placed in literary almanacs, and critics spoke positively about the test of the young writer 's pen.
In 1980, Julian Barnes published his first novel "Metroland", which tells about the serious changes in the fate of people, when they turn from rebellious and independent personalities into careerists, chasing high status and material wealth. In 1997, director Philip Saville filmed the novel to make a great movie starring Christian Bale and Emily Watson. The novel was published in Russian in 2001.
His novel "Love and so on" was also filmed, both in England and in France at the same time. In both cases, Barnes co-wrote the scripts.
As a child, Julian read detective stories, and when he became a writer, he could not pass by this genre. He wrote not just detective stories, but investigative novels. And he wrote very quickly, creating storylines and situations on the go. For example, he wrote the detective "Duffy got in trouble" in just two weeks, and again it had the name "Den Kavanagh" on it. And he published the detective "Arthur and George" under his real name.
Public interest was also aroused by Barnes's novel Flaubert's Parrot, in which he made the main character a writer who was interested in the life of the famous classic Gustave Flaubert.
Also, the writer has works that grew out of his journalistic work: "A pedant in the kitchen" and "Open your eyes." And he also wrote short stories about love: "How it was", "Love and so on."
For his literary work, Barnes was repeatedly nominated for various awards. In total, he has just over ten awards, including the Booker Prize (2011) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2004).
Personal life
Julian was not married for a long time, and it seemed that he would no longer have a family. One day he met Pat Kavanaugh, who was a literary agent. He was thirty-two, she was thirty-eight. However, the age difference did not prevent Barnes from falling in love and then marrying Pat.
When his wife passed away in 2008, he suffered so much that he wanted to commit suicide. This is not to say that they were the perfect couple, there was everything in life. However, Julain carried his great love for his wife throughout his life.
And she helped him not to take his own life, because then no one would have remembered his beloved - after all, she is alive as long as he keeps memories of her. This is how he explained his decision.
The writer found comfort in communicating with the children and grandchildren of his older brother, Jonathan Barnes.
The writer loves Russian literature, communicates with Russian colleagues, and as an accomplished novelist, he once again visited Moscow and recalled his youthful trip.
