After departures

Julian Barnes (United Kingdom) has suggested that Departure(s), published earlier this year, will be his final book. With this novel about love, happiness and farewells, he brings a long literary career into focus, one that established him as a central figure in contemporary English fiction with works such as Flaubert’s Parrot and The Sense of an Ending. Recently awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, he is a writer with a distinctly European outlook, whose work moves between fiction and reality, irony and melancholy, and a sustained attention to how stories are constructed, remembered, and revised. One of the most important writers of contemporary fiction will be in conversation with Oleksandr Mykhed.