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Pat Barker
Dame Patricia Mary W. Barker DBE, FRSL, FBA (née Drake; born 8 May 1943) is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres on themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. She is known for her Regeneration Trilogy, published in the 1990s, and, more recently, a series of books set during the Trojan War, starting with The Silence of the Girls in 2018.
Patricia Mary W. Drake was born on 8 May 1943 to a working-class family in Thornaby-on-Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England. Her mother Moyra died in 2000; her father's identity is unknown. According to The Times, Moyra became pregnant "after a drunken night out while in the Wrens." In a social climate where illegitimacy was regarded with shame, she told people that the resulting child was her sister, rather than her daughter. They lived with Barker's grandmother Alice and step-grandfather William, until her mother married and moved out when Barker was seven. Barker could have joined her mother, she told The Guardian in 2003, but chose to stay with her grandmother "because of love of her, and because my stepfather didn't warm to me, nor me to him." Her grandparents ran a fish and chip shop which failed and the family was, she told The Times in 2007, "poor as church mice; we were living on National Assistance – 'on the pancrack', as my grandmother called it."
At the age of eleven, Barker won a place at grammar school, attending King James Grammar School in Knaresborough and Grangefield Grammar School in Stockton-on-Tees.
Barker, who says she has always been an avid reader, studied international history at the London School of Economics from 1962-65. After graduating in 1965, she returned home to nurse her grandmother, who died in 1971.
Barker has written many novels. In her mid-twenties, Barker began to write fiction. Her first three novels were never published and, she told The Guardian in 2003, "didn't deserve to be: I was being a sensitive lady novelist, which is not what I am. There's an earthiness and bawdiness in my voice.”
Her first published novel was Union Street (1982), which consisted of seven interlinked stories about English working class women whose lives are circumscribed by poverty and violence.[citation needed] For ten years, the manuscript was rejected by publishers as too "bleak and depressing." Barker met novelist Angela Carter at an Arvon Foundation writers' workshop. Carter liked the book, telling Barker "if they can't sympathise with the women you're creating, then sod their fucking luck," and suggested she send the manuscript to feminist publisher Virago, which accepted it. The New Statesman hailed the novel as a "long overdue working class masterpiece," and The New York Times Book Review commented Barker "gives the sense of a writer who has enormous power that she has scarcely had to tap to write a first-rate first novel." Union Street was later adapted as the Hollywood film Stanley & Iris (1990), starring Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda. Barker has said the film bears little resemblance to her book.[citation needed] As of 2003, the novel remained one of Virago's top sellers.
Barker's first three published novels – Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984) and Liza's England (1986; originally published as The Century's Daughter) – depicted the lives of working-class women in Yorkshire. BookForum magazine described them as "full of feeling, violent and sordid, but never exploitative or sensationalistic and rarely sentimental." Blow Your House Down portrays prostitutes living in a North of England city, who are being stalked by a serial killer. Liza's England, described by the Sunday Times as a "modern-day masterpiece," tracks the life of a working-class woman born at the dawn of the 20th century.
Following the publication of Liza's England, Barker felt she "had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist—label, label, label—novelist. It's not a matter so much of objecting to the labels, but you do get to a point where people are reading the labels instead of the book. And I felt I'd got to that point", she said in 1992. She said she was tired of reviewers asking "'but uh, can she do men?' – as though that were some kind of Everest".
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Pat Barker
Dame Patricia Mary W. Barker DBE, FRSL, FBA (née Drake; born 8 May 1943) is an English writer and novelist. She has won many awards for her fiction, which centres on themes of memory, trauma, survival and recovery. She is known for her Regeneration Trilogy, published in the 1990s, and, more recently, a series of books set during the Trojan War, starting with The Silence of the Girls in 2018.
Patricia Mary W. Drake was born on 8 May 1943 to a working-class family in Thornaby-on-Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England. Her mother Moyra died in 2000; her father's identity is unknown. According to The Times, Moyra became pregnant "after a drunken night out while in the Wrens." In a social climate where illegitimacy was regarded with shame, she told people that the resulting child was her sister, rather than her daughter. They lived with Barker's grandmother Alice and step-grandfather William, until her mother married and moved out when Barker was seven. Barker could have joined her mother, she told The Guardian in 2003, but chose to stay with her grandmother "because of love of her, and because my stepfather didn't warm to me, nor me to him." Her grandparents ran a fish and chip shop which failed and the family was, she told The Times in 2007, "poor as church mice; we were living on National Assistance – 'on the pancrack', as my grandmother called it."
At the age of eleven, Barker won a place at grammar school, attending King James Grammar School in Knaresborough and Grangefield Grammar School in Stockton-on-Tees.
Barker, who says she has always been an avid reader, studied international history at the London School of Economics from 1962-65. After graduating in 1965, she returned home to nurse her grandmother, who died in 1971.
Barker has written many novels. In her mid-twenties, Barker began to write fiction. Her first three novels were never published and, she told The Guardian in 2003, "didn't deserve to be: I was being a sensitive lady novelist, which is not what I am. There's an earthiness and bawdiness in my voice.”
Her first published novel was Union Street (1982), which consisted of seven interlinked stories about English working class women whose lives are circumscribed by poverty and violence.[citation needed] For ten years, the manuscript was rejected by publishers as too "bleak and depressing." Barker met novelist Angela Carter at an Arvon Foundation writers' workshop. Carter liked the book, telling Barker "if they can't sympathise with the women you're creating, then sod their fucking luck," and suggested she send the manuscript to feminist publisher Virago, which accepted it. The New Statesman hailed the novel as a "long overdue working class masterpiece," and The New York Times Book Review commented Barker "gives the sense of a writer who has enormous power that she has scarcely had to tap to write a first-rate first novel." Union Street was later adapted as the Hollywood film Stanley & Iris (1990), starring Robert De Niro and Jane Fonda. Barker has said the film bears little resemblance to her book.[citation needed] As of 2003, the novel remained one of Virago's top sellers.
Barker's first three published novels – Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984) and Liza's England (1986; originally published as The Century's Daughter) – depicted the lives of working-class women in Yorkshire. BookForum magazine described them as "full of feeling, violent and sordid, but never exploitative or sensationalistic and rarely sentimental." Blow Your House Down portrays prostitutes living in a North of England city, who are being stalked by a serial killer. Liza's England, described by the Sunday Times as a "modern-day masterpiece," tracks the life of a working-class woman born at the dawn of the 20th century.
Following the publication of Liza's England, Barker felt she "had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist—label, label, label—novelist. It's not a matter so much of objecting to the labels, but you do get to a point where people are reading the labels instead of the book. And I felt I'd got to that point", she said in 1992. She said she was tired of reviewers asking "'but uh, can she do men?' – as though that were some kind of Everest".