Pat Barker

The Booker Prize-winning author of Regeneration shares the role characters play in developing novel ideas and explains what appeals to her about reimagining mythology.

- AMY JONES

BY Para at Barker is a writer's writer. Though she's accumulated numerous accolades over her decades-long Fiction Prize, and was made a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for her services to literature, she still concerns herself with things like what it means to write effective dialogue and looking past the bad first draft to see if a story has legs. "The thing about writing is it's not difficult," Barker says, now in her early 80s.

"The rules of good writing are incredibly simple. It's just that it takes you 50 years to learn." This sense of humor about her writing life filled our conversation ranging from her opinion about whether a writer's unfinished work should be published posthumously ("I do actually have a horror of leaving an orphan book where you can imagine your publisher and your executor and your agent say, 'Oh, well, it's a bit of a mess, isn't it? But on the other hand, perhaps we can just about rescue it and push it out. I don't want all that. I want any book that's published under my name to have been finished") to what she told herself about winning the Booker prize to be able to keep working ("It's such a stroke of luck.

But that's all it is.... Julian Barnes said it was 'posh bingo, and I said, when I won it, it was three lemons in a row.