Pat Barker

Barker grew up working-class in Thornaby-on-Tees, raised mostly by her grandparents; her grandfather bore a bayonet scar from the First World War that she stared at as a child without ever being told its story. She wrote for years without success until Angela Carter, reading an early manuscript, urged her to abandon a middle-class register that wasn't hers and write the Northern working-class women's lives she actually knew: advice that produced Union Street (1982), her breakthrough.

She turned to the First World War itself with the Regeneration trilogy, beginning with Regeneration, which brought the real poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen into a Scottish military hospital confronting shell shock and the war's psychiatric toll. The trilogy's third volume, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995. She has returned repeatedly to wartime and its aftermath in later novels, including Life Class and Toby's Room.