Susan Barker

A taxi driver in Beijing starts receiving letters from someone claiming to have known him for a thousand years, and so begins a wild ride back through time. Susan Barker’s remarkable novel The Incarnations, winner of a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, is the result of deep engagement with China’s history and culture.

At this special event presented in partnership with the Confucius Institute, she will discuss the time she spent writing and researching the novel in Beijing and the way she interweaves characters from the Tang and Ming Dynasties, the Mongol invasion, the Opium Wars and the Cultural Revolution in the book. The New York Times called the book ‘dazzling … her natural storytelling gifts shine from every paragraph.’ Susan Barker is the author of two previous novels, Sayonara Bar and The Orientalist and the Ghost, both longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Introduced by MLF Chair Jerome de Groot.