Barry Unsworth

Unsworth was born in the County Durham mining village of Wingate, the descendant of several generations of miners, and studied at Manchester University before spending long stretches of his adult life teaching English abroad in Turkey, Greece, and Italy on British Council postings, settings that recur throughout his historical fiction.

He built a reputation for deeply researched novels examining how systems of trade and empire corrupt the people who run them, from Ottoman-era Istanbul in The Rage of the Vulture to a Greek island under Ottoman rule in Pascali's Island.

Sacred Hunger (1992) follows a Liverpool slave ship's idealistic surgeon and its owner's ruthless son through the 1750s Atlantic trade's brutality, and the doomed, mixed-race utopian community its mutinous survivors found in the Florida swamps to escape it; the novel shared the Booker Prize with Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Unsworth continued writing until his death in Italy in 2012.