Barry Unsworth - Biography

Biography

Unsworth was born in Wingate, a mining village in County Durham, England, to a family of miners. His father first entered the mines at age 12 and ordinarily Unsworth would have followed him into the mines. However when his father was 19, he travelled to the United States for a few years and on returning to England entered the insurance business and thus began moving his family up the economic ladder and out of the mines. "He rescued my brother and me from that long chain of continuity that happens in mining villages," Unsworth said.

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 fictionalized description of his efforts at settlement in the Italian countryside.

Unsworth died in Italy in 2012, of lung cancer. 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."