A.L. Barker

1918–2002

English novelist and short-story writer, born Audrey Lilian Barker in St Paul’s Cray, Kent, and raised in Beckenham. Sent to work at sixteen by her father, she was later employed by the Amalgamated Press, as a reader for the Cresset Press and as a BBC subeditor. Her first book, the story collection Innocents (1947), won the first Somerset Maugham Award. She published eleven novels and ten collections, often concerned with childhood, and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1970. She died in 2002. John Brown’s Body, her fourth novel, was shortlisted for the 1970 Booker Prize.

Timeline of A.L. Barker’s life

Works

• John Brown's Body (1969)

Prizes

• John Brown's Body — The Booker Prize 1970: Shortlist