Julian Barnes Wins Man Booker Prize He Once Called ‘Posh Bingo’

Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction last night for “The Sense of an Ending,” a slim novel whose narrator must grapple with the fallibility of his memory and sense of self when a friend’s long-ago suicide returns to haunt him.

This is the 65-year-old Barnes’s first time winning the U.K.’s most prestigious literary award, which comes with 50,000 pounds ($78,400), though three of his previous novels were shortlisted.