Fourth time lucky for Booker winner

JULIAN BARNES won the Man Booker Prize at the fourth attempt last night for his novel The Sense of an Ending.

He picked up the £50,000 (€57,000) prize at a ceremony at Guildhall in London.

Stella Rimington, who chaired the judging panel, said the 150-page novel “spoke to the humankind in the 21st century”.

The book is the story of a middle-aged man struggling to come to terms with his life as his past begins to unravel from the moment he receives a lawyer’s letter.

Barnes has previously been shortlisted for the prize three times with no success, but Rimington said that “didn’t figure in the debate”.

She said the slim volume stood up to re-reading several times and praised Barnes’s style, adding: “We thought it was a beautifully written book”.

The five judges took just over 30 minutes to come to their decision and Rimington said it was eventually unanimous, adding that “there was no blood on the carpet”.

She said: “We had a shortlist of six very different books and people obviously had different views but we ended up in the same place.”

Barnes is the author of scores of critically-acclaimed novels, short stories and essays.The Leicester-born writer grew up in the London suburbs which inspired his first novel Metroland, which was made into a film in 1997.

Accepting the award, he thanked his publishers “for their wisdom and the sponsors for their cheque”.