NICOLA BARKER – Booker Prize Short-Listed Novelist

Nicola Barker, Novelist

Nicola Barker‘s 2025 novel, TonyInterruptor – her 14th – is “not a satire per se but trains a sharp satirical eye on jazz culture (specifically a slightly stuffy, majority-white British pocket of it), academia and the mid-20s social media lens” (Buzz Magazine). The book has not yet been published in the United States, but you can now order the UK version online.

In a recent 2026 article for the London Review of Books, literary critic Leo Robson notes that TonyInterruptor centers on an incident of interruption at a jazz performance that reverberates across its characters, generating both personal and intellectual inquiry. He highlights the novel’s layered, discursive structure and quick-witted dialogue, reflecting Barker’s characteristic engagement with performance, meaning, and the act of naming.

Barker’s work has been translated into 25 languages and her epic novel, Darkmans, was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Her post-post-apocalyptic novel, H(A)PPY (2017) was the winner of the Goldsmith’s Prize. She has been twice appeared on the Booker Prize long list: in 2012 for The Yips, the “most flamboyant piece of comic fiction ever to be set in Luton,” and for Clear (2004), a novel inspired by David Blaine’s dramatic suspension over East London. I Am Sovereign  (2019) won immediate critical acclaim. The Guardian‘s Tony Litt aptly described Barker as “literary royalty,”  The quote on the front of the book, also from The Guardian, simply states: “She really is a genius.” 

Many of Barker’s novels are available digitally in the US through Open Road.