Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, on January 19, 1946. He received a degree in modern languages from Magdalen College, Oxford University in 1968. He has held jobs as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary, a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the New Review, and a television critic. He has written numerous works of fiction including Metroland, which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1980, Flaubert's Parrot, which won both the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1985 and a Prix Medicis in 1986, England, England, Arthur and George, Pulse: Stories, and The Sense of an Ending, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2011. He also writes non-fiction works… including Letters from London, The Pedant in the Kitchen, and Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He received the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation in 1993, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2004, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2011. He writes detective novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanaugh. His works under this name include Duffy, Fiddle City, Putting the Boot In, and Going to the Dogs.