Unsworth, Barry

The British author Barry Unsworth was born to a family of miners in County Durham, northeast England. They moved away from the mining region and began their climb up the social ladder when his father began to work for an insurance company. Barry Unsworth attended Stockton-on-Tees Grammar School and read English at the University of Manchester between 1948 and 1951 after which he did his national service. He spent much of the 1960s living in Greece and Turkey where he taught at the universities of Athens and Istanbul. On his return to England he settled in Cambridge where he continued to teach. In the 1980s he taught at the universities of Newcastle, Durham, Liverpool as well as at the University of Lund, Sweden. In 1998, he received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Manchester. He taught creative writing at the University of Iowa in the United States in the 1990s and in 2004 at Kenyon College, Ohio. At the end of his life, Barry Unsworth lived in Perugia, Italy.