With the publication of the Regeneration trilogy (1991-5), Pat Barker’s status as a leading British novelist was confirmed. The Eye in the Door won the Guardian Prize for Fiction in 1993 and The Ghost Road was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1995. However, Barker’s earlier writing has often been dismissed as ‘working-class’, ‘regional’ or ‘women’s’ writing. Considered as a corpus, Barker’s fiction powerfully explores the ideas of trauma and recovery and these are important themes that connect her work. In trauma, time is disrupted and experience is subject to delay and retrospection. The temporal dislocation of trauma means that the traumatic event cannot be securely located in the past …
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Citation: Whitehead, Anne. "Pat Barker". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 October 2004 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5426, accessed 22 November 2024.]
