Veteran British author Julian Barnes was on Wednesday named the winner of Spain's top literature prize for decades of work that "offers a lucid, warm and compassionate vision of humanity".
The jury of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature "highlighted his status as an extraordinary storyteller and essayist, gifted with humour and irony", read the official announcement.
Barnes, 80, "uses memory as a shaper of identity without letting go of imagination, with love as an essential principle", the jury added.
"His work recreates, with a pro-European lens, the history of literature, art, music and even gastronomy... which singles him out within an especially brilliant generation of British authors that has marked contemporary literature."
Born in the English city of Leicester in 1946, Barnes has penned 15 novels and 10 works of non-fiction in a career that has earned top literary prizes in the UK and France.
