Patricia Duncker

Patricia Marjory Duncker is a British novelist and academic, born in Kingston, Jamaica, on June 29, 1951, and named after her aunt, the poet Patricia Beer. She was educated at Bedales School, read English at Newnham College, Cambridge, and earned a doctorate at St Hugh's College, Oxford. Duncker taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, was Professor of Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, and later served as Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester from 2007 to 2015. Her debut novel, Hallucinating Foucault (1996), won the McKitterick Prize, and she went on to publish The Deadly Space Between (2002), the story collection Seven Tales of Sex and Death (2003), and The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (2010). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2026.