Booker Prize-winning novelist Julian Barnes turns 80 on Monday and has been very busy. “I can’t remember a period of months when ther’s been so much going on,” he says.He’s pictured above in London in 2017.
Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images Europe
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Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images Europe
Six years ago, British author Julian Barnes was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. But rather than feel angry or fearful, Barnes experienced a strange calm; he approached the disease with what he calls his “novelist’s interest.”
“I love talking to doctors and consultants and nurses.They stick their needles into your arm and take off pints of blood,” he says. “It’s very interesting. Tho like many things, it does get a bit tedious on the 34th time of taking a pound of blood out of you.”
Cancer means that Barnes,who turns 80 on Jan.19, will spend the rest of his life on chemotherapy drugs.Still, he says, he doesn’t grieve for his aging and ailing body.
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