Throughout this time he has been writing, teaching, curating and leading tours to cultural sites all over Europe, as well as to Armenia, Georgia and Turkey. He subsequently joined Christie’s Education where he was a Programme Director for fourteen years. For several years, he was a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, focusing on the metalwork collections and the British Galleries. Precedents of the Unprecedented: Black Squares Before Malevichīorn in London, Andrew Spira graduated from the Courtauld Institute, before working at the Temple Gallery (specialists in Byzantine, Russian and Greek icons) where he developed a passion for Russian art.Awarded biennially, the prize honours a lifetime’s achievement in literature for a writer in the English language who is a citizen of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland.

In 2011 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the San Clemente literary prize. In England his honors include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. In France, he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 2004 he became a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

His recent publications include Pulse, a collection of short stories, and The Sense of an Ending, winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Julian Barnes is the author of three books of stories, books of essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain, and numerous novels, including Metroland published in 1980.

An Unlikely Lunch: When Maupassant met Swinburne.

Blue Twilight by Sarah King