Barry Unsworth’s fifteen novels offer a feast of reading; he is a vigorous, highly-skilled storyteller who can conjure up ancient Greece, medieval Sicily, fourteenth-century England, Renaissance Venice, colonial Florida, Ottoman Constantinople, Thatcher’s Liverpool, 1990s Umbria, and a host of other times and places. His fiction supplements its broadly realistic approach with elements from a variety of popular genres and literary modes: the historical novel, Gothic fiction, the spy thriller, the murder mystery, satire, black comedy, symbolism and metafiction. His key themes are the upsurge of unrecognized or unsatisfied desires; the “ancient urge”, as his best-known book, Sacred Hunger (1992), puts it, “to command attention, dom

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First published 02 July 2004 ; revised 29 December 2006

Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "Barry Unsworth". The Literary Encyclopedia. 2 July 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4501, accessed 9 February 2010.]