Barry Unsworth, considered one of the foremost historical novelists in English, who was known for rich, densely textured fiction that conjured lost worlds — those of the Trojan War, medieval Europe and the Napoleonic age, among many others — died on June 4 in Perugia, Italy. He was 81 and had lived in the Umbria region of Italy for many years.

The cause was lung cancer, said Lois Wallace, his literary agent in the United States.

An Englishman, Mr. Unsworth won a Booker Prize in 1992 for “Sacred Hunger,” a story of avarice set amid the Atlantic slave trade of the 18th century. The award, now known as the Man Booker Prize, is considered Britain’s loftiest literary honor. (Mr. Unsworth shared it that year with Michael Ondaatje, who won for “The English Patient.”)

Writing about “Sacred Hunger” in The New York Times Book Review this year, the novelist John Vernon said:

“The novel contains a vision of hell on earth unlike any in contemporary fiction, largely because its account of the unimaginable cruelties of the slave trade is told in the well-wrought prose of an old-fashioned 19th-century novel with an omniscient narrator. The effect is uncanny: its intelligent, controlled and immensely readable sentences glow with a deathly pallor.”

Mr. Unsworth’s books, characterized by prodigious research and propulsive narrative force, have long been renowned in Britain and have gained a broad international following in the last few decades.