Pat Barker

Pat Barker was born in 1943 in Yorkshire. Barker’s mother became pregnant after a night of drinking, so not only was her father unknown to her for her entire life, but her mother hid the fact that Barker was her illegitimate child (since illegitimacy was seen as shameful at the time) by claiming that her daughter was actually a much younger sister. Barker spent her whole childhood living with her grandparents whom she loved, even after her mother remarried and moved away. Her grandparents owned a small restaurant which eventually went under and they were desperately poor. Even so, Barker earned a position at a well-regarded grammar school as a child and pursued her education. Barker eventually studied international history at the London School of Economics, earning her degree in 1965. Around this time, Barker started writing fiction as well, though she would later regard what she produced as weak, dainty attempts. In 1969, Barker met her future husband, an academic 20 years older than her, who left his wife to marry Pat instead, though they were not legally married for another ten years, after they’d had two children together. In the early 1970s, Barker wrote her first critical success, Union Street, an anthology of seven women’s stories tied together by poverty and domestic violence. However, she struggled to get it published for ten years, as most publishing houses thought it too dark for mainstream appeal. However, when a fellow female author directed her to the feminist publishing house Virago, the novel went on to critical success in 1982 and remains the publisher’s best-selling piece. In the 1990s, although she was often labeled a feminist author, Barker created the Regeneration Trilogy about men and masculinity during wartime, starting with Regeneration in 1991. This trilogy also enjoyed critical success, with one of the novels winning the prestigious Man Booker Prize and another of them shortlisted for it. Barker became a widow in 2009. Her daughter Anna Barker Ralph followed in Barker’s footsteps and became a novelist herself.