Author Dame Pat Barker thought honours letter was income tax bill

The Herald Scotland

13-06-2025

The Booker Prize winner has published 16 novels, diving into anti-war themes including trauma and memory.
Describing the moment she received the news of her damehood, she said: 'I picked up the envelope from the carpet and the first thing I noticed, what beautiful quality paper it was, and I thought, this is either the income tax getting really angry, or it's something from the Palace or the Cabinet Office.
Author Pat Barker holds up her award-winning novel, The Ghost Road, at London's Guildhall after winning the Booker Prize (Neil Munns/PA)
'Nobody else does that kind of quality of paper. I still sort of had to read the first paragraph several times before it sank in.'
Her debut novel, Union Street, was published in 1982 and won her the 1983 Best Of Young British Novelists award.
It was later made into the film, Stanley And Iris, starring Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro.
She added: 'One of the things that, in spite of everything, I like about the British honour system is the way it records people who do very low profile, working for free, long hours, weeks, months, years, for something that they genuinely believe in and usually unpaid, and for the benefit of other people, and they are the bedrock of the honour system, and they actually are the reason why it is so respected, and knights and dames are just cherries on the top of that cake.
'I am happy to be a cherry.'
The author is known for exploring the effects of war in her novels, attributing her grandfather and stepfather as inspiration for some of her most popular books.
She said: 'I was very much a war baby. My Victory in Europe Day was my second birthday, and I thought the street parties were for me, as any two year old would.
'I think in my family, there were people who bore the very visible mental and physical injuries of war.
'My stepfather, for example, was in the trenches at 15, my grandfather had a bayonet wound, and he used to get stripped off at the kitchen sink, and the bayonet wound was terrible, very obvious, and he never talked about it. So you've got the two things there that are essential for writers, a story that is obviously present, but which isn't being told.
'The last thing any writer needs is a completed story. What you need as a writer is a mystery. And I had that.'
She began writing the Regeneration trilogy in 1991 with the first book following English Lieutenant Billy Prior as he is being treated for shellshock.
The book was adapted into a film in 1997 which starred The Two Popes actor Jonathan Pryce and Maurice's James Wilby.
In 1993, Dame Pat published the second book in the trilogy, The Eye In The Door, which follows William Rivers, the psychiatrist treating Prior at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh.
She was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and in 1995 won the Booker Prize for Fiction for The Ghost Road, the third book in the trilogy, which recounts the final months of the war from alternating perspectives of Billy, as he is about to rejoin the war, and William, who grapples with the work he has done to help injured men at the hospital.
More recently, the novelist was shortlisted for The Women's Prize For Fiction in 2019 for her book, The Silence Of The Girls, part of The Woman Of Troy trilogy, which recounts the lives of women living through the Trojan War.
The Silence of the Girls won an award (Alamy/PA)
It is followed by The Women Of Troy (2021) and The Voyage Home (2024), and sees the author shift her storytelling both in its genre, from historical fiction to myth, and characters, writing from the perspective of women instead of men.
She said: 'I was wanting to deal with the experience of women, and specifically with rape as a weapon of war, because that is really what the Trojan trilogy, as it is at the moment, is about and that is also a very up to date, modern area of political and legal debate, making rape a war crime similar and equal to other war crimes.
'I think that is a battle that is still being fought for women in lots of ways. And that shadows the subsequent lives of women, but also of their children, who are very often the product of rape, and that is difficult for the woman and the child and the community that the woman comes from.
'So it seems as if it's thousands of years ago but actually myth isn't thousands of years ago. Myth is applicable to our lives today, and that's always what I want to bring out.'
Dame Pat was born in Thornaby-on-Tees, Cleveland, and raised mainly by her grandparents.
She began her writing career in her late 30s after studying international history at the London School of Economics and taught history and politics at colleges of further education until 1982.