Honorary Fellow Julian Barnes, who was an undergraduate at Magdalen between 1964 and 1968, has won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of an Ending. See a report here.
This is the third time a member of Magdalen has won the Booker Prize in the last eight years. Previous winners were Alan Hollinghurst for The Line of Beauty (2004) and Aravind Adiga for A White Tiger (2008).