Barry Unsworth was born in Wingate, a mining village in Durham, England. He graduated from the University of Manchester in 1951, and lived in France for a year teaching English. During the 1960s he traveled in Greece and Turkey, lecturing at the University of Athens and the University of Istanbul. In the last years of his life, he lived in Perugia, Italy. Unsworth is better known for his mainstream fiction and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, winning once with his novel Sacred Hunger.