Nicola Barker: Critical Essays

Berthold Schoene is Professor of English and Faculty Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange for Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University. His books include Writing Men (2000), Posting the Male (2003), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (2007), The Cosmopolitan Novel (2009) and The Edinburgh Companion to Irvine Welsh (2010). His latest book is Accelerated Times: British Literature in Transition, 1980–2000 (2019).

Nicola Barker's eight previous novels include Darkmans (short-listed for the 2007 Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden), Wide Open (winner of the 2000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and Clear (longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short-stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in east London. Her latest novel, The Yips, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012.

Ben Masters is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Noughties (2012), a novel, and Novel Style: Ethics and Excess in English Fiction since the 1960s (2017), and has written for Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, New York Times, Literary Review and Five Dials, as well as flash fiction for the BBC.

Daniel Marc Janes is Deputy Editor at Review 31. His writing has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the London Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement.

Len Platt is Professor of Modern Literatures at Goldsmiths. He has published on James Joyce and on contemporary culture in various genres and technological forms. He is also a leading expert on early musical theatre. His most recent monograph is Writing London and The Thames Estuary, 1576–2016 (2017).

Ginette Carpenter is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests are focused on discourses of gender, reading, space and history as articulated in contemporary women's writing and film. She has published on Jeanette Winterson, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and women and the gothic, and is co-editor of Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2018)

Beccy Kennedy is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curating at Manchester School of Art. She has curated exhibitions for Asia Triennial Manchester and written on the topics of borders, biennials, the Gothic, and contemporary visual cultures of East Asia and the East Asian Diaspora.

Christopher Vardy is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. He has published articles on the relationship between nostalgia, materialism and adolescence in British historical fiction, the figure of the abused child as a metaphor for historical change, and the political significance of dystopian narratives about the 1980s. He co-edited Rupert Thomson: Critical Essays (2016).

Huw Marsh is Lecturer in Modernist and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Beryl Bainbridge (2014) and has published work on authors including Nicola Barker, Penelope Lively, Ian McEwan and Angela Carter. His second monograph The Comic Turn in Contemporary English Fiction: Who's Laughing Now? was published by Bloomsbury in 2020.

Alice Bennett is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Liverpool Hope University. She is the author of Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction (2012) and Contemporary Fictions of Attention (2018).

Eleanor Byrne is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Deconstructing Disney (1999) and Homi K. Bhabha (2009). She was co-investigator on the 2016–17 British Academy-funded network 'Troubling Globalisation: Arts and Humanities Approaches'.