Raffaella Barker
Raffaella Barker was born in London in 1964 and moved to Norfolk when she was three. Her father, the poet George Barker, had 15 children; she is the oldest of those by the novelist Elspeth Barker.
She spent her childhood in Norfolk sulking and refusing to get dressed, going everywhere in her nightie. She recalls worrying about how to respond at school when asked how many brothers and sisters she had. She did not know the answer.
After Norwich High School, Raffaella Barker moved to London and did life modelling and film-editing. She landed a job on Harpers & Queen magazine and later freelanced as its motoring columnist. For 10 years she wrote a column for Country Life about her week.
Her debut novel Come and Tell Me Some Lies was published in 1994, followed by The Hook, Hens Dancing, Summertime, Green Grass, the children's book Phosphorescence and A Perfect Life.
Divorced, she lives in Norfolk with her three children aged 17, 15 and eight.
“I feel as if I am the eye of my own storm, still, like the mermaid, at the center of my own chaos.”
“She turns and walks on to the plane and the red dress flips and swishes through the doorway, vanishing from his sight but burned on to his retina like a hot kiss.”
“It's like grains of sand crumbling in warning at the beginning of a landslide to realise I have not missed him.”
“I don't know if I liked my life then, I just lived it.”
“What will it be like to be one instead of half of two?”
“Ryder has appeared in my dreams once in a while, and in my thoughts a little more often through the last five years (...)”