Paul Barker

Paul Barker was born and brought up in the upper Calder valley, in West Yorkshire, northern England. This is Bronte country. It is also where the poet Ted Hughes was born, and many of his most impassioned poems are set.

So Paul pleads guilty to being a Yorkshireman through and through. When asked where he’s from always says : “I live in London but I’m from Yorkshire really.”

He went south to make his name as a journalist – for The Times, the Economist and other papers. For many years he was Editor of New Society, a prestigious and widely read weekly magazine of social inquiry. His contributors included the novelist Angela Carter, the art critic John Berger, the playwright Dennis Potter, and a glorious array of young academics and other writers at the very beginnings of their careers.

The aim of the magazine – as of Paul himself – was to observe and understand, before jumping to conclusions. George Orwell is one of Paul’s heroes. He always has on his wall Orwell’s photo, seen sitting at his typewriter. Paul organised the installation of a commemorative blue plaque at one of Orwell’s London homes.

Paul has written for all the London quality press and has regularly broadcast – usually on BBC radio – on social and cultural issues. He has edited and contributed to numerous books.

In Hebden Bridge : A Sense of Belonging (2012), he vividly explored his Yorkshire origins, through the history of a single village. It has been described as “a classic in the making.” His wife Sally, with whom he has three sons and a daughter, is from the same part of the world.

By contrast, in The Freedoms of Suburbia (2009), Paul wrote a fierce polemic in which he defended suburbia and suburbanites from their many enemies. The trouble, he concluded, was sheer snobbery. To his delight, this book has now been re-published in Chinese.

In Arts in Society (2007), Paul published a brilliant collection of essays on popular culture. The Independent declared it to be “the gold standard for this kind of writing.” Paul’s own deepest interests include architecture and theatre.

Paul has now moved into the writing of fiction. “A whole new world,” he says. His first novel, A Crooked Smile, was published as an e-book in April 2013. It is a crime novel, which frees itself from the current obsession with police-procedurals. “Is bureaucratic in-fighting really all that interesting?” Paul asks.

Paul vividly chronicles his investigator’s quest to find a missing person, the girl with the crooked smile. The quest opens with a corpse in a provincial rooming house. But the fast-paced, insightful story widens out into all levels of society, including cosmopolitan plutocrats and the lethal purveyors of pornography and blackmail. At each stage, more blood is shed.

The book is written in a way which leaves the way open for future novels featuring the same tight-lipped hero.