Barry Unsworth

Barry Unsworth is a British novelist who writes historical fiction. He has published 17 novels, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once for the 1992 novel Sacred Hunger. 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.
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