Julian Barnes Named Laureate of the 2026 Fitzgerald Prize
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JUAN-LES-PINS, France, June 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The jury of the Fitzgerald Prize has announced British novelist Julian Barnes as the laureate of its 15th edition. The award was presented this evening on the terrace of Hôtel Belles Rives in Juan-les-Pins, the legendary Art Deco property on the Côte d'Azur where F. Scott Fitzgerald once lived and wrote, and where the prize has gathered writers, journalists, and readers every June since 2011. Barnes was recognized for Départ(s), published in January 2026 by Éditions Stock, translated by Jena-Pierre Aoustin.
“I am delighted and honored to be awarded the Prix Fitzgerald, and the more so to receive it in the place where he lived when he was writing Tender Is the Night. He is my favorite American writer of the interwar period, and he is read as avidly eight-six years after his death as in his lifetime” said Julian Barnes, the 2026 Fitzgerald Prize recipient at Hôtel Belles Rives this evening.
One of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed voices, Barnes is the recipient of the Man Booker Prize for ‘The Sense of an Ending’ and the author of a body of work distinguished by its formal precision, wry intelligence, and unsentimental tenderness. In ‘Départ(s)’, he turns to themes of departure and return — the quiet devastation of what is left behind, and the stories that survive it. The jury praised the novel for its elegance of construction and the emotional authority with which Barnes inhabits his subject matter.
"In fifteen years of the Fitzgerald Prize, I have read novels that moved me, surprised me, and stayed with me long after the last page. Départ(s) did all three," says Marianne Estène-Chauvin, President of the Francis Scott Fitzgerald Academy and owner of Groupe Belles Rives. "Julian Barnes writes about loss and leaving with a clarity that is almost unbearable — and yet one reads it as one watches a beautiful sunset over this bay: grateful, and a little bereft. To welcome him to Hôtel Belles Rives this evening, on this terrace, in this light, felt like exactly the kind of moment this prize was created for. And when Julian spoke, his words were the very reason I had the perhaps crazy idea, fifteen years ago, to create this prize. What a gem for a 15th edition. This evening belongs to Julian Barnes."
The prize was established in 2011 by Marianne Estène-Chauvin, whose family has owned Hôtel Belles Rives since the 1930s, the very property where Fitzgerald worked on Tender Is the Night and where the mythology of the Jazz Age Riviera took shape. The Fitzgerald Prize annually honors a work of fiction that reflects the spirit of that era: bold in perspective, precise in style, and alive to the contradictions of modern life.
Barnes was selected from a distinguished shortlist that included Christian Kracht (‘1979’, Denoël & d’ailleurs), Martin Suter (‘L’Amour et la Fureur’, Phébus), Charlotte Casiraghi (‘La Fêlure’, Julliard), and Yasmin Zaher (‘Dans ma peau’, L’Olivier).
The jury is presided over by Bertrand de Saint Vincent, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Le Figaro, and includes journalists, novelists, and cultural figures: Daphé Roulier-De Caunes, Marie-Dominique Lelièvre, Éric Neuhoff (elected to the Académie française in 2025), François Armanet, Frédéric Beigbeder, Christophe Ono dit Biot, and Hélène Fillieres.
The evening concluded with the traditional Writers’ Dinner on the hotel’s terrace, overlooking the rocky peninsula of Cap d’Antibes, the white jetty, and the gleam of the ‘green light’ across the bay—a setting that has become inseparable from the prize’s identity and from the Fitzgeraldian imagination it celebrates.
Barnes joins a distinguished line of laureates that includes Richard Ford (2025), Joyce Carol Oates (2024), Quentin Tarantino (2023), Jonathan Dee (2022), Jeffrey Eugenides (2019), William Boyd, Jay McInerney (2016), and Christopher Bollen (2015).
For more information, visit bellesrives.com and follow on Instagram @bellesrives.
ABOUT HÔTEL BELLES RIVES
Hôtel Belles Rives is an Art Deco landmark above the Mediterranean at Juan-les-Pins, where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote chapters of ‘Tender Is the Night’ and where the spirit of the Jazz Age Riviera remains palpable. The property offers 43 renovated rooms and suites, the one-Michelin-starred restaurant La Passagère under Chef Aurélien Véquaud, the newly renovated Bar Fitzgerald, a private beach and water sports club, and a Valmont beauty corner. Now in the hands of its fourth generation, Antoine Chauvin-Estène, Hôtel Belles Rives honors its singular heritage while evolving with considered intention.
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