Julian Barnes

Barnes read modern languages at Oxford and worked for years as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary's supplement before turning to literary journalism and, on the side, writing hard-boiled crime novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. Flaubert's Parrot (1984), his genre-blurring hunt for the 'real' Flaubert, made his reputation and was the first of four Booker shortlistings before he finally won, on his fourth try, for The Sense of an Ending in 2011.

His wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, died of a brain tumor in 2008 after thirty years of marriage; his account of grief, Levels of Life (2013), yoked her death to the history of ballooning in one of his most personal books. A committed Francophile fluent in the language and steeped in Flaubert, he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur by the French state.