A. L. Barker

Nick Turner (University of Salford)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

Born 13 Apr 1918
Died 21 Feb 2002
Activity 1938-2002

Places

Born in England
Active in England

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Story-writer

Resources

Audrey Lilian Barker was born in Kent in 1918. She left school at 16 as her father, a railway clerk, was not in favour of full-time education. She was sent to work in a clock-making firm, and was then a secretary in London offices and a junior sub-editor for the Amalgamated Press. During the Second World War she worked with the Land Army and the National Fire Service; after the war she began writing for the BBC.

Her first work, the short story collection Innocents, was published in 1947; it won the first ever Somerset Maugham Award. Barker continued with jobs as publisher’s reader for Cresset Press, followed by three decades at the BBC where she was a subeditor on the Listener for five years, until she retired in 1…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1252 words

Citation: Turner, Nick. "A. L. Barker". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 July 2014 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=257, accessed 26 November 2024.]

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here