Pat Barker

Standard Name: Barker, Pat
Birth Name: Patricia
Married Name: Patricia Barker
Nickname: Pat Barker
PB is a contemporary writer of fiction (novels, linked tales, and short stories) who began publishing about women's lives but has made her special subject-matter the working-class culture of northern industrial towns and the experience of fighting men in the twentieth century's two world wars.
Colour photo of Pat Barker signing a copy of her book "Toby's Room". She sits behind a table with a glass of red wine, wearing a black top and silver necklace.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Fictionalization Laura Riding
Critic Jerome McGann asserts that LR , while making no claim to transcendent poetic power, makes poetry out of her own power to rise above her subject. In this he associates her with Felicia Hemans
Intertextuality and Influence Sarah Daniels
It is often said of both novel and play that they are about Peter Sutcliffe , the Yorkshire Ripper. In fact the subject is a group of prostitutes and the way they respond in...
Literary responses Hilary Mantel
HM already features in critical surveys of the modern British novel, such as that by Nick Rennison , 2004. A. S. Byatt discusses her (among writers of both sexes including predecessors Elizabeth Bowen and Muriel Spark
Literary Setting Ali Smith
As a novel, Hotel World is more like a cohering of various stories linked by the looming presence of the London Global Hotel, part of a semi-upscale hotel chain that boasts of a consistent experience...
Occupation Ruth Rendell
As a member of the Booker panel, RR was delighted that her personal first choice, Pat Barker 's The Ghost Road, won the award.
“Tears, tiffs and triumphs”. Guardian Unlimited.
Performance of text Sarah Daniels
Blow Your House Down, SD 's dramatic adaptation of the Pat Barker novel with the same title, opened at the Live Theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Bartleet, Carina. “Bringing the House Down: Pat Barker, Sarah Daniels, and the Dramatic Dialogue”. Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker, edited by Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahem Yousaf, and Ronald Paul, University of South Carolina Press, 2005, pp. 87 - 100.
88 n6
Griffin, Gabriele. “Violence, Abuse, and Gender Relations in the Plays of Sarah Daniels”. The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, edited by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 194 -11.
194, 207
Reception Rose Tremain
When in 1983 the magazine Granta presented a list of twenty names identified as the Best Young British Novelists, RT was among them (along with Pat Barker , Martin Amis , Salman Rushdie ...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Diana Athill
Nicholas Lezard wrote in the Guardian that this book teaches, in every line[,] the consolations of age, the common, shareable tone of experience. Athill begins the book, in fact, with her own old age, and...

Timeline

Spring 1983
Granta magazine's first listing of twenty Best of Young British Novelists included the names of six women: Pat Barker , Ursula Bentley , Buchi Emecheta , Maggie Gee , Lisa St Auban de Teran , and Rose Tremain .
February 1993
Two eleven-year-old boys, Robert Thomson and Jon Venables , were convicted of the murder of two-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool.