Elspeth Barker

Elspeth Barker (16 November 1940 – 21 April 2022) was a Scottish novelist and journalist.

Elspeth Langlands was born in Edinburgh and was raised in Drumtochty Castle, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where her parents ran a prep school for boys. From 1958, she read Literae Humaniores (Classics) at Somerville College, Oxford.

As a journalist, Barker wrote features and reviews for The Independent, The Observer, The Sunday Times, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and the Observer. She taught creative writing at universities in the UK, Europe and the US. She also held a position as a Visiting Professor of Fiction at Kansas University. She served as a judge for the McKitterick and Sagittarius literary prizes.

Barker's only novel, O Caledonia, was published in 1991. It won four awards, including the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, given by the Royal Society of Literature to the best regional novel published by an author from the United Kingdom. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. Her edited anthology Loss, about bereavement, was published in 1997. Her reviews and essays appeared in a 2012 collection, Dog Days. Another collection, Notes from the Henhouse: On Marrying a Poet, Raising Children and Chickens, and Writing, was published posthumously in 2024.

Her first husband was the poet George Barker with whom she had five children, including the novelist Raffaella Barker. In 2007, she married the writer Bill Troop. Her portrait was painted by UK artist Terence McKenna. Barker died at her home in Aylsham on 21 April 2022, aged 81, from health issues following a stroke.