It is completely incomprehensible to people far from literature how they become writers. Indeed - why do people begin to write; why do they need to share with people what they think, what they dream about and what they worry about? No one 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. The writer simply cannot but transfer to paper his feelings and impressions of life, that’s all. The main thing is that someone needs this.
Julian Barnes was lucky in this regard - he is read, his works are discussed and filmed. He also became the winner of several literary prizes.
Biography
Julian Patrick Barnes was born in 1946 in Leicester, which is located near London. His parents were both teachers of the French language, so a humanitarian atmosphere reigned in the house. From childhood, the son of Barnes was distinguished by a stormy imagination, about which he was repeatedly told. However, no one suspected that this was the property of a real writer. Moreover, Julian himself for a long time did not show any interest in literary activity. 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”, is 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 bold trip to the USSR. In 1965, he and a group of friends traveled across Europe to Moscow. They rented a small bus, and went on a trip on it. 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 at the stake - they led the lives of real travelers.
Having been a little in Moscow, they went to Leningrad, then Kharkov, Kiev and Odessa were on their way. They really liked these wonderful cities. They returned home through Romania.
This journey could not fail to impress the impressionable young man: he wrote down everything that he saw and experienced in the form of travel notes. He also brought with him many photographs.
In general, Barnes loved traveling, and subsequently more than once traveled to France to practice French and see the beauties of the southern country. Here he often disappeared in museums, where he completely fell in love with painting and spent hours wandering through the halls, absorbing this beauty.
Having been educated at Oxford, Barnes worked for some time in various media as a journalist, and in parallel wrote his first works.
Literary career
At the beginning of his career, Barnes published detective stories under the pseudonym Dan Cavan. They were placed in a literary almanac, and critics spoke positively about the sample of the pen of a young writer.
In 1980, Julian Barnes published his first novel, Metroland, in which he talks about serious changes in the fate of people when they turn from rebels and independent personalities into careerists who pursue high status and material wealth. In 1997, director Philippe Savill filmed the novel, and it turned out to be a great film in which the main roles were played by Christian Bale and Emily Watson. In Russian, the novel was released in 2001.
His novel "Love and so on" was also filmed, both in England and 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 get past 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 Detective Duffy Impaled in just two weeks, and again on it was the name Den Cavan. And the detective "Arthur and George" he published already under his real name.
The public’s 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.
The writer also has works that have grown out of his journalistic work: “The Pedant in the Kitchen” and “Open Your Eyes”. And he also wrote short stories about love: “As Everything Was, ” “Love, and so on.”
For literary work Barnes has repeatedly been nominated for various awards. In total, he has a little more than ten awards, including the Booker Prize (2011) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2004).
