Nicola Barker

Nicola Barker was recently named one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists by Granta Magazine.  Since her earliest national publications in the 1990s, Barker has received overwhelming recognition and awards, including the David Higham Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen award for Love Y our Enemies (her first short story collection published in 1993), and an Arts  Council Writers’ Award  and John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize for Heading Inland (1997).  Her third novel Wide Open, the story of two brothers coming to terms with their past, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2000. 

            Barker was born in 1966 in Ely, Cambridgeshire , England .  She lived part of her childhood with her parents and sister in South Africa , but returned to England with her mother in 1981.  She received her degree from King’s College, Cambridge and spent much of her time after that working in a bakery in Soho , a bookmaker’s near Oxford Street in London , and at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Sick Children in Hackney.  She lives and works in London .

Return to Performance Page