In an Open Book special, Booker Prize winning novelist Pat Barker talks to Mariella Frostrup about her career as a writer. Barker started as a feminist author in the early 1980s, writing about the lives of northern working class women. However, she is most lauded for her Regeneration Trilogy which tracks the relationship of war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen with eminent war neurologist Dr William Rivers. After a 12 year hiatus of more contemporaneous writing she returned to the First World War, this time to world of the war artist and to art, in her Life Class trilogy. The novels follow the fortunes of three young painters who meet at the Slade at the outbreak of war.

Pat Barker discusses her life, work and her new novel Noonday, and writing about men, women and war. Show less