Pat Barker is the author of sixteen novels, beginning with her working-class masterpiece Union Street in 1982. Her Regeneration Trilogy novels, set in the First World War, were awarded the Booker Prize and praised as some of the greatest historical novels in British literature. Her latest novels are The Silence of the Girls, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Gordon Burn Prize in the UK and won the Independent Bookshop Award in 2019, and The Women of Troy. She was made a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2000. She lives in Durham, England.