Nicola Barker

Nicola Barker (born March 30, 1966 in Ely , Cambridgeshire ) is a British writer who has been awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize , the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award , the Hawthornden Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize for her books .

Life

Nicola Barker, who had spent part of her childhood in South Africa , returned to England with her family in 1980 and, after completing her education, studied at King's College at the University of Cambridge .

She made her literary debut in 1993 with Love Your Enemies , a collection of black-humorous and surreal short stories for which she received both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Macmillan Silver Pen Award from the British PEN . For the short story collection Heading Inland (1996) she was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize of the Sunday newspaper The Mail on Sunday in 1996.

Nicola Barker received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2000 for her novel Wide Open (1998), the story of two brothers grappling with their past. This novel was followed by, among others, Five Miles from Outer Hope (2000), about a young woman who lives on a small island off the coast of Devon , and Clear , in 2004 , which was inspired by the glass box in which the magician David Blaine was left without food for 44 days Lived across the Thames near Tower Bridge .

In 2007, her novel Darkmans was published , which not only received the Hawthornden Prize in 2008, but was also nominated for the Booker Prize for 2007 and the Ondaatje Prize. The novel is about the court jester and biographer of the English King Edward IV. In 2010 the comical epistolary novel Burley Cross Postbox Theft was published . In 2017 she was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize for her novel H (a) ppy .

Works

Novels

• Reversed Forecast (1994)
• Small Holdings (1995)
  • Small proportions , German by Brigitte Heinrich; Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997. ISBN 978-3-518-40865-0
• Wide Open (1998)
  • Wide open , German by Brigitte Heinrich; Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999. ISBN 978-3-518-41045-5
• Five Miles from Outer Hope (2000)
  • Needles in the ear , German by Brigitte Heinrich; Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002. ISBN 978-3-518-41318-0
• Disabled (2002)
• Clear: A Transparent Novel (2004)
• Darkmans (2007)
• Burley Cross Postbox Theft (2010)
• The Yips (2012)
• In the Approaches (2014)
• The Cauliflower (2016)
• H (a) ppy (2017)

stories

• Love Your Enemies (1993)
• Heading Inland (1996)
• The Three Button Trick: Selected Stories (2001)

Web links

• Literature by and about Nicola Barker in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Nicola Barker at perlentaucher.de
• Biography and Bibliography (contemporarywriters.com)
• Author portrait (harpercollins.com)
• Interview: "I won't make you feel better". Nicola Barker revels in giving her readers hostile characters in odd locations. No wonder she's addicted to Big Brother ... ( The Guardian , April 29, 2007)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Sorrows of Young Medve. Nicola Barker's new novel "Needles in the Ear" (book review, tour-literatur.de)
2. ^ Nicola Barker: Brass with our minds in Ashford. Nicola Barker on her haunting novel Darkmans (themanbookerprize.com) ( Memento of the original from May 21, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Book review (theasylum.wordpress.com)