Julian Barnes wins 2011 Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 has been won by Julian Barnes for The Sense Of An Ending. The prize, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008, aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The book was praised by the judges as a “truly wonderful novel that will have the reader immersed in the story from the very first page, and all the while marvelling at the precision of Barnes’ prose”. Julian Barnes had been previously nominated for the Booker Prize for Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). The selection for this years prize was heavily criticised by some commentators as signs of a “dumbing down” of the competition. Comments were also made about the lack of representation of authors from outside the UK apart from two Canadian authors.