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."
Read more about this topic: Barry Unsworth
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)