Barry Unsworth

Not to be confused with Barrie Unsworth, Premier of New South Wales 1986-1988.

Barry Unsworth (born 10 August 1930) is a British novelist who writes historical fiction. He has published 15 novels, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger.

Personal life

Unsworth was born in Wingate, a mining village in County Durham, England.

He graduated from the University of Manchester in 1951, and lived in France for a year teaching English. He also traveled extensively in Greece and Turkey during the 1960s, lecturing at the University of Athens and the University of Istanbul. His novels about fin-de-siecle Ottoman Empire, The Rage of the Vulture and Pascali's Island, were inspired by these experiences. His second novel, The Greeks Have a Word For It, was an out-growth of his teaching experience in Athens.

In 1999 he was a visiting professor at the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2004 he taught literature and creative writing classes at Kenyon College in Ohio.

He currently lives in Umbria, Italy, with his second wife, a Finnish national. His novel After Hannibal is a fictionalised description of his efforts at settlement in the Italian countryside.

Writing career

Unsworth's first novel, The Partnership, was published in 1966 when he was 36. "...in my earlier novels, especially the two written in the early ’70s, The Hide and Mooncranker’s Gift, there was a baroque quality in the style, a density. The mood was grim, but the language was more figurative and more high-spirited. There was more delight in it, more self-indulgence, too. Among my earliest influences as a writer were the American novelists of the deep south, especially Eudora Welty, and some of that elated, grotesque comedy stayed with me."

Other novels include Mooncranker's Gift (1973) (winner of the Heinemann Award), Stone Virgin (1985), and Losing Nelson (1999). He counts William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers as his major influences.

Unsworth did not start to write historical fiction until his sixth novel, Pascali's Island. Pascali's Island (1980), the first of his novels to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is set on an unnamed Aegean island during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Reflecting on this shift, Unsworth explained: "Nowadays I go to Britain relatively rarely and for short periods; in effect, I have become an expatriate. The result has been a certain loss of interest in British life and society and a very definite loss of confidence in my ability to register the contemporary scene there – the kind of things people say, the styles of dress, the politics etc.– with sufficient subtlety and accuracy. So I have turned to the past. The great advantage of this, for a writer of my temperament at least, is that one is freed from a great deal of surface clutter. One is enabled to take a remote period and use it as a distant mirror (to borrow Barbara Tuchman’s phrase), and so try to say things about our human condition – then and now – which transcend the particular period and become timeless." Pascali's Island was adapted as a film by James Dearden, starring Charles Dance, Helen Mirren, and Ben Kingsley as the title character.

Morality Play, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995, is a murder mystery set in 14th-century England. It was adapted as a film, The Reckoning, starring Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe.

"With time I have grown more sparing with the words. I think less of fire-works and flourishes. I try to get warmth and color through precision of language. This is more difficult, I think, which may be why I find writing novels so challenging and exacting."

Booker Prize

Sacred Hunger (1992) centers on the Atlantic slave trade that moves from Liverpool to West Africa, Florida and the West Indies. It was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1992, along with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient.

The story is set in the mid-18th century and centers around the snow Liverpool Merchant, a slave ship employed in the triangular trade, a central trade route in the Atlantic slave trade. The two main characters are cousins Erasmus Kemp, son of a wealthy merchant from Lancashire, and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who goes on the voyage. The novel's central theme is greed, with the subject of slavery being a primary medium for exploring the issue (the "sacred hunger" of the title refers to the profit motive). The story line has a very extensive cast of characters, some featuring in only one scene, others continually developed throughout the story, but most described in intricate detail. The narrative interweaves elements of appalling cruelty and horror with extended comedic interludes, and employs frequent period expressions.

Sugar and Rum (1988) was a novel set in contemporary Liverpool about a writer who is trying to write a novel about the Liverpool slave trade, and who is suffering from writer's block; Unsworth wrote this novel to try to get over his own block during the writing of Sacred Hunger.

Novels

• The Partnership (1966)
• The Greeks Have a Word For It (1967)
• The Hide (1970)
• Mooncranker's Gift (1973)
• The Big Day (1976)
• Pascali's Island (1980) (US edition first published as The Idol Hunter)
• The Rage of the Vulture (1982)
• Stone Virgin (1985)
• Sugar and Rum (1988)
• Sacred Hunger (1992)
• Morality Play (1995)
• After Hannibal (1996)
• Losing Nelson (1999)
• The Songs of the Kings (2002)
• The Ruby in her Navel (2006)
• Land of Marvels (2009)
• The Quality of Mercy (2011)

External links

• 2008 interview with LITTORAL: the journal of the Key West Literary Seminar
• Audio recordings from Key West Literary Seminar, 2009: Unsworth reading from Land of Marvels | 'The Economy of Truth' (lecture) | 'Why Bother with the Past?' (lecture)
• [1] Land of Marvels broadcast interview on WFMT Radio
• Barry Unsworth at Contemporary Writers