Veteran British author Julian Barnes was on Wednesday named the winner of Spain’s top literature prize for decades of work that “offers a lucid, warm and compassionate vision of humanity”.
The jury of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature “highlighted his status as an extraordinary storyteller and essayist, gifted with humour and irony”, read the official announcement.
Barnes, 80, “uses memory as a shaper of identity without letting go of imagination, with love as an essential principle”, the jury added.
“His work recreates, with a pro-European lens, the history of literature, art, music and even gastronomy… which singles him out within an especially brilliant generation of British authors that has marked contemporary literature.”
Born in the English city of Leicester in 1946, Barnes has penned 15 novels and 10 works of non-fiction in a career that has earned top literary prizes in the UK and France.
Previous winners of the Princess of Asturias Award include Japan’s Haruki Murakami, US writers Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster as well as Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.
“The measure of a prize always lies in the quality of those who have previously received it, and I am more than honoured to join the list of such distinguished names,” Barnes said in a statement.
He published his first novel “Metroland” in 1980, about the different paths taken by two childhood friends.
In the 1980s, Barnes penned four crime novels under the name Dan Kavanagh, borrowing the surname of his then wife and literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who died in 2008.
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He was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for his novel “The Sense of An Ending”, following three previous unsuccessful nominations.
His last novel “Departure(s)” was published in January, days after his 80th birthday, an anniversary he thought he would never reach following a diagnosis for a rare form of blood cancer six years earlier.
Founded in 1981, the Princess of Asturias Awards are the most prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world and come with prize money of €50,000 ($57,750).
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