The offbeat novelist on the difficulty of writing novels about writing novels – and sitting on her roof to watch the sun rise
Nicola Barker is the author of 13 novels, including the Booker-shortlisted Darkmans (2007) and the Goldsmiths prize-winning H(a)ppy (2018). Her work is resolutely avant garde, typically finding revelatory significance in everyday situations, whether on a golf course or in a British seaside town. She’s seeing out lockdown in Faversham, where she lives with two elderly French bulldogs, Moses and Sarge. Barker’s most recent novel, I Am Sovereign, has just been published in paperback.
I Am Sovereign is a novel that is intimately concerned with the difficulty of writing novels. Did writing H(a)ppy somewhat exhaust the form for you?
This book exists to answer that question. It’s a way of explaining to myself why it’s impossible for me now to write novels. After I wrote H(a)ppy, I effectively felt as if I’d destroyed the novel for myself. So it’s what do you do then? How do you come back from that kind of destruction?
