Which author won the 2011 Booker Prize for 'The Sense of an Ending'?

Julian Barnes won the 2011 Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending.

The compact, psychologically intricate novel is narrated by Tony Webster, a retired man looking back on his school years and an old friendship with Adrian Finn. When an unexpected inheritance reconnects Tony with parts of his past, his confident version of events begins to unravel.

The book examines memory, guilt and the way people edit their own histories. Its title echoes a phrase associated with literary critic Frank Kermode, whose 1967 book The Sense of an Ending studied how people impose patterns and endings on experience. Barnes uses that idea to question whether remembering the past is the same as knowing it.

Barnes had already been shortlisted three times, for Flaubert’s Parrot, England, England and Arthur & George. His 2011 victory therefore ended a long sequence of near-misses. The novel is also notably brief for a Booker winner, at roughly 160 pages in its first edition.