Julian Barnes – Αναχωρήσεις

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

“This will definitely be my last book — my official departure, my final conversation with you.” Julian Barnes wrote that line into Departure(s), published in January 2026 to coincide with his 80th birthday, and on Thursday 15 October 2026 he brings its Greek edition, Anachoriseis, to the Megaron, the Athens Concert Hall, for a public conversation.

Barnes won the 2011 Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending, after three earlier shortlistings for the same prize. By his own account Departure(s) is his fifteenth novel and his last. It blends fiction, memoir and essay: the narrator is a writer named Julian, living in north London with blood cancer, who reflects on losing his wife to a brain tumour and follows the love affair of two college friends he once introduced, a couple who find each other again decades later. Mortality, memory and time run through all of it. The Greek translation is by Katerina Schina, published by Metaichmio in 2026.

The evening, Julian Barnes – Anachoriseis, is part of the Megaron Plus programme and the Writers, Books, Ideas series co-organised by the Megaron and the Hellenic Foundation for Books and Culture (ELIVIP). Barnes appears in conversation with journalist and author Ilias Maglinis, with simultaneous interpretation from English into Greek. The series opened its season on 29 September with Ian McEwan; Barnes is next.

The crowd is made of readers who have kept Barnes on the shelf for decades, translators, students of English literature, and people who read Departure(s) this year and want to hear from the man behind its narrator named Julian. The format is a conversation, not a lecture.

The setting is the Dimitris Mitropoulos Hall, the Megaron’s 494-seat second hall, normally home to chamber music. The vibe is attentive and quiet, a room leaning towards a single voice. The sound is conversation, interpreted simultaneously from English into Greek. At the door, admission is open but requires an electronic reservation, capped at two per person.

That cap is the practical detail that decides who gets in. Reservations open on webtics.megaron.gr on Thursday 8 October 2026, exactly one week ahead, and with 494 seats shared out two at a time, the morning the reservations open matters as much as the evening itself. The conversation starts at 19:00.

If you want a reading performed with music or a staged adaptation of the novels, this is not that format. But if you want to hear a Booker winner talk about ageing, illness and the end of a writing life, in the year he declared this book his last, this is the room.

The Megaron is on Vasilissis Sofias Avenue. Megaro Moussikis metro station connects to the building through an underground passage, so you arrive without crossing the avenue above.

One night in Athens with a writer who has already told his readers goodbye in print.