Barry Unsworth

 ( 1930 Births ) 

He graduated from the University of Manchester in 1951, and lived in France for a year teaching English. He also travelled 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. He published his first novel in 1966, his second novel, The Greeks Have a Word For It, was an outgrowth 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.

In the last years of his life, he lived in Perugia, a city in the Umbria region of 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.

Unsworth died in Perugia, Italy in 2012, of lung cancer.Fox, Margalit (7 June 2012) Barry Unsworth, Writer of Historical Fiction, Dies at 81 The New York Times. Retrieved 8 June 2012 He was 81. Unsworth died the same day as Ray Bradbury; as Cynthia Crossen said in the Wall Street Journal, "Mr. Bradbury invented the future; Mr. Unsworth invented the past."

Unsworth did not start to write historical fiction until his sixth novel, Pascali's Island (1980), the first of his novels to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Pascali's Island is set on an unnamed Aegean island during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Reflecting on this shift, Unsworth explained: "Nowadays I go to Britain relatively rarely and for short periods; in effect, I have become an expatriate. The result has been a certain loss of interest in British life and society and a very definite loss of confidence in my ability to register the contemporary scene there – the kind of things people say, the styles of dress, the politics etc.– with sufficient subtlety and accuracy. So I have turned to the past. The great advantage of this, for a writer of my temperament at least, is that one is freed from a great deal of surface clutter. One is enabled to take a remote period and use it as a distant mirror (to borrow Barbara Tuchman’s phrase), and so try to say things about our human condition – then and now – which transcend the particular period and become timeless." A film version directed by James Dearden, starring Charles Dance, Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley, as the title character, was released in 1988.

Morality Play, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995, is a murder mystery set in 14th century England about a travelling troupe of players that put on Bible plays. It was adapted as a film, The Reckoning (2004), starring Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe.

Sacred Hunger (1992) centres on the Atlantic slave trade that moves from Liverpool to West Africa, Florida and the West Indies. It was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1992, along with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. It is generally considered his masterpiece. The story is set in the mid-18th century and centres around the Liverpool Merchant, a slave ship employed in the triangular trade, a central trade route in the Atlantic slave trade. The two main characters are cousins Erasmus Kemp, son of a wealthy merchant from Lancashire, and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who goes on the voyage. The novel's central theme is greed, with the subject of slavery being a primary medium for exploring how selfish desire for profit can result in evil and barbarism. The "sacred hunger" of the title refers to the profit motive. The story line has a very extensive cast of characters, some featuring in only one scene, others continually developed throughout the story, but most described in intricate detail. The narrative interweaves elements of appalling cruelty and horror with extended comedic interludes, and employs frequent period expressions. A sequel, The Quality of Mercy, was published in 2011, it was his last book.

Sugar and Rum (1988) was a novel set in contemporary Liverpool about a writer who is trying to write a novel about the Liverpool slave trade, and who is suffering from writer's block; Unsworth wrote this novel to try to get over his own block during the writing of Sacred Hunger.