Julian Barnes Wins 2026 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature
The jury cited his decades of work and said his fiction offers a lucid, warm and compassionate vision of humanity.
- Veteran British author Julian Barnes was on Wednesday named the winner of Spain's Princess of Asturias Award for Literature for work that "offers a lucid, warm and compassionate vision of humanity."
- The jury described his status as an extraordinary storyteller and essayist, "gifted with humour and irony." Additionally, the jury noted Barnes "uses memory as a shaper of identity without letting go of imagination, with love as an essential principle."
- Founded in 1981, the Asturias Awards are the most prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world and include a $57,750 cash prize. Previous winners include Haruki Murakami, Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
- Barnes will receive the award on October 23, 2026. Accepting the honor, he said, "The measure of a prize always lies in the quality of those who have previously received it, and I am more than honoured to join the list of such distinguished names."
- Recently publishing his novel "Departure" following a diagnosis of manageable blood cancer, the author's work recreates history with a "pro-European lens." This perspective singles him out within an especially brilliant generation of British writers.
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The Princess of Asturias Prize puts Julian Barnes on the threshold of the Nobel Prize in Literature, as has happened with some notable cases, such as that of Bob Dylan.
The novelist has a "one-of-a-kind style, which singularizes it within a generation of particularly brilliant British authors, who have marked contemporary literature," says the award.
The jury of the Princess of Asturias de las Letras Prize unanimously decided to award its 2026 edition to the 80-year-old British writer Julian Barnes, one of the great names of contemporary literature. The award awards a career of more than four decades marked by stylistic elegance, intellectual depth and an unwavering exploration of themes such as memory, love, loss and the inexorable passage of time.
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