Barker, Pat
Barker, Pat , ( Patricia Barker ) ( 1943 – ),novelist, born in Thornaby-on-Tees, north Yorkshire. She studied at the London School of Economics in the 1960s, then had a brief teaching career before making her notable debut as a novelist with Union Street ( 1982 ). This episodic account of the lives of seven working-class neighbours partly recalled the northern realist novels of Barstow and Sillitoe , with one crucial difference: Barker's main characters were women. Leavening the occasional brutalism of her narratives with generosity and flashes of humour, Barker gave the novel a unique texture which Hollywood tried to replicate, with comically disastrous results, in the movie adaptation Stanley and Iris ( 1989 ). Her next two novels were Blow Your House down ( 1984 ), in which a group of prostitutes attempt to eke out their livelihood in fear of a marauding serial killer, and The...
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