British · b. 1943
Pat Barker won the Booker Prize in 1995 for "The Ghost Road," the final volume of her Regeneration trilogy about World War I. The trilogy follows actual figures—Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen—through psychiatric treatment and back to the trenches. Barker began writing about working-class women in the North of England; war became her central subject. "The Silence of the Girls" (2018) retells the Iliad from Briseis's perspective. Her prose is direct; her attention to violence is unflinching.