Elspeth Barker

O Caledonia opens with sixteen-year-old Janet lying dead on the great stone staircase of Auchnasaugh, below its stained-glass window, and then turns back to tell the short life that ended there, including the jackdaw chick, Claws, she raises into her closest companion. Elspeth Barker knew that world from the inside. Christened Elizabeth Roberta Cameron Langlands and born in Edinburgh in 1940, she was brought up at Drumtochty Castle in Aberdeenshire, where her parents ran a preparatory school for boys. She read Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1958, married the poet George Barker and had five children with him, among them the novelist Raffaella Barker, and reviewed for the Independent, the Observer, the Sunday Times and the Guardian. The novel appeared in 1991, when she was fifty, and remained her only one. It took the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and three further awards, and was later reissued with an introduction by Maggie O'Farrell. Barker died in April 2022 at 81.