BRITISH AUTHOR Julian Barnes on Tuesday night won the Booker Prize for his latest novel The Sense of an Ending after failing to win the prestigious annual award despite making the shortlist three times earlier.
London-based 65-year-old Barnes, who had once described the Booker Prize as “posh bingo,” was shortlisted thrice earlier for the Booker Prize for his novels Arthur and George (2005), England, England (1998) and Flaubert’s Parrot (1984).
Barnes accepted the prize and its accompanying £50,000 cheque with a smile and relief at the awards dinner at the Guildhall in London. “It’s true, it says so here: Julian Barnes — The Sense of an Ending,” commented the writer after accepting the prize, as if he could not believe the fact that he had finally won it.
Barnes also quoted the story about Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and his failure to win the Nobel Prize for literature. “He always used to reply that in Sweden there was this small cottage industry solely devoted to not giving Borges the Nobel prize,” Barnes said, comparing it to his own situation of always failing to win the Booker.
“At times, over the last few years, during occasional moments of mild paranoia, I have wondered whether there wasn’t perhaps some similar sister organisation operating over here. So I am as much relieved as I am delighted to receive the prize,” he said.
Barnes competitors for the prize included two Canadian writers Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers) and Esi Edugyan (Half Blood Blues) and three Britons Carol Birch (Jamrach’s Menagerie), Stephen Kelman (Pigeon English) and A.D. Miller (Snowdrops). Sixty-year-old Birch, who lives in Lancashire, England, had been the bookies’ second favourite to win the prize.
Barnes, in his earlier criticism of the prize, had savaged the Booker prize for “driving publishers mad with hope, booksellers mad with greed, judges mad with power, winners mad with pride, and losers mad with envy and disappointment.”
However, on Tuesday night, Barnes came out in the defence of the Booker jury, which has been at the centre of a growing controversy over the literary quality of the shortlist. “I won’t hear a word against (the judges),” he said to loud laughter of the audience at the black tie dinner. This year’s judging panel was led by former director-general of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, Dame Stella Rimington, and included writer and journalist Matthew d’Ancona, author Susan Hill, author and politician Chris Mullin and Daily Telegraph books editor Gaby Wood.
Each of the six shortlisted authors, including Barnes, received £2,500 and a designer bound edition of their books.
The decision to award the prize to Barnes, whose 150-page novel focused on the unreliability of memory, was unanimous after the jury discussed the issue for about half-an-hour, Dame Stella said as she announced the prize. “I can tell you there was no blood on the carpet and nobody went off in a huff,” she said.
London author and newspaper columnist Howard Jacobson won the Booker prize last year for The Finkler Question and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel swept the prize in 2009. Indian author Aravind Adiga won the Booker prize for his debut novel The White Tiger in 2008, the last time an Indian author won the award.
Dame Stella defended her criteria “readability” that lead to a furious debate in the UK about the quality of the Booker shortlist and a new fiction award being announced. The jury’s decision not to shortlist Booker winner Alan Hollinghurst’s The Strang-er’s Child also added to the ferocity of the debate.

“We were not talking about only readability as some of you seem to have thought. We were talking about readability and quality. You can have more than one adjective when you are talking about books,” she said.