Pat Barker

A full evaluation of the innovative, award-winning British novelist Pat Barker, whose first novel, the acclaimed Union Street was published in 1982. Barker won the Booker Prize in 1995 for The Ghost Road, the final novel in the Regeneration Trilogy. The Trilogy provides a creative and critical intervention on the First World War and pushes to the limits in describing human endurance. In stories of psychological and physical conflict, Barker explores communities and individuals under stress, whether in the trenches or in late 20th century urban landscapes, as in Another World and Border Crossing. In her work, which is witty and unsentimental, Barker successfully distils historical and class memory, combining the national and the personal while keying into contemporary debates on the social construction of gender and sexuality and the effects of violence. The experiences of men and women, adults and children, are interwoven across novels which explore and expose British society and our psychological responses to 'living in the shadow of monstrosities'.