Handwritten draft of Barry Unsworth's 1992 novel, "Sacred Hunger."

British author Barry Unworth, whose archive resides at the Ransom Center, died earlier this week at the age of 81.

Unsworth, who is known for such acclaimed novels as Sacred Hunger (1992), Pascali’s Island (1980), and The Ruby in Her Navel (2006), handwrites all of his novels, and the archive contains manuscripts of all but one of the 16 novels he wrote before 2007.

In this age of computers and word processing, Unsworth’s handwritten drafts reveal much about his creative process. The above page is from a draft from his Booker Prize–winning novel, Sacred Hunger (1992). This draft fills five notebooks. The novel centers on an eighteenth-century slave ship, which Unsworth describes on this page as: “a particle in…