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8 November 2017updated 24 Feb 2021 6:49pm

Nicola Barker: “I’m a niche writer and see no harm in it. I like niches”

The author of H(A)PPY on dystopias, Henry James, mindfulness and cake.

By India Bourke

(Photo By Photo: Eamonn McCabe)

This is the fourth in a series of interviews with the writers shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize, run in association with the New Statesman

“The banal is a warm blanket,” the protagonist in H(A)PPY is encouraged to believe. Yet banal is also the last thing anyone could level at Nicola Barker’s strange and puckish new novel, now shortlisted for the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction.

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