Don't be thrown when Julian Barnes pops into cafeteria conversation. This handy guide will instantly upgrade your Barnes quotient and show off your newly acquired wisdom. Just remember to thank us when you shine. And maybe read a Barnes novel or three when you find the time.
1. Julian Barnes is an English writer. He is 65 years of age.
2. He won the Man Booker Prize for 2011 for his novel The Sense of an Ending, which The Guardian described as a "highly wrought meditation on ageing, memory and regret."
3. He has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times previously for Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998) and Arthur and George (2005).
4. On finally winning the Booker, Barnes remarked, "I didn't want to go to my grave and get a Beryl," he said. He was referring to Beryl Bainbridge, the English novelist who was shortlisted five times for the Booker but never won. She received a posthumous Best of Beryl Booker prize. Ironically, Bainbridge had been named among the "50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945" by The Times.
5. Barnes is an acknowledged Francophile. His collection of ten stories, Cross Channel (1996), showcases his preoccupation with Britain's relationship with France.
6. Barnes published his first novel Metroland in 1980
7. Among his best known novels is the Booker-shortlisted Flaubert's Parrot (1984), a semi-biographical novel about the French writer Gustave Flaubert who wrote the celebrated and controversial novel Madame Bovary, about a doctor's adulterous wife.
8. Barnes was married to Pat Kavanagh, a well-known literary agent, who died in 2008. Why is this detail important? Because Barnes wrote four books under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.
9. He also used the pseudonym Edward Pygge (also used by writers Ian Hamilton, John Fuller, Clive James and Russell Davies) to satirize current poetic fashions in the literary magazine The Review.
10. Barnes has admitted to being painfully, reclusively shy
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