Laura Barton
Encyclopedia
Laura Barton is a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 writer and journalist. She writes mainly for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

, and published her first novel, Twenty-One Locks, in 2010.

She was born and grew up in the village of Newburgh
Newburgh, Lancashire
Newburgh is a rural village and civil parish in Lancashire, England.Newburgh is located about five miles from Ormskirk. Its history can be traced back to 1304 when a licence was granted to start a weekly market. The village has a conservation area at its centre and includes many historic ...

 in Lancashire
Lancashire
Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...

, and was educated at Upholland High School. She moved out of the area to read for an English degree at Worcester College, Oxford
Worcester College, Oxford
Worcester College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. The college was founded in the eighteenth century, but its predecessor on the same site had been an institution of learning since the late thirteenth century...

, and following graduation, started writing for The Guardian, as a journalist and feature writer, in 2000. She has also written for Q
Q (magazine)
Q is a popular music magazine published monthly in the United Kingdom.Founders Mark Ellen and David Hepworth were dismayed by the music press of the time, which they felt was ignoring a generation of older music buyers who were buying CDs — then still a new technology...

 magazine, The Word, and Intelligent Life
Intelligent Life (magazine)
Intelligent Life is a quarterly cultural magazine from the publishers of The Economist. It was launched in September 2007 as a quarterly publication, having previously been a summer annual, and describes its coverage as "the arts, style, food, wine, cars, travel and anything else under the sun, as...

, and appeared on BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...

. Much of her writing relates to rock
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...

 and pop music
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...

, and she writes a fortnightly column about music for The Guardians Film and Music supplement, called 'Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll', as well as a much slighter weekly column on Women's issues for the newspaper's G2 supplement, called 'The View from a Broad'.

Her first novel, Twenty-One Locks, tells the story of "a young small-town girl facing the biggest decision of her life". Barton has said she is working on a second novel and a non-fiction book about music. A series of short stories about Northern soul
Northern soul
Northern soul is a music and dance movement that emerged from the British mod scene, initially in northern England in the late 1960s. Northern soul mainly consists of a particular style of black American soul music based on the heavy beat and fast tempo of the mid-1960s Tamla Motown sound...

 were broadcast on Radio 4 in 2011. Her favourite writers include Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. was an English poet, Roman Catholic convert, and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous 20th-century fame established him among the leading Victorian poets...

, Richard Yates
Richard Yates (novelist)
Richard Yates was an American novelist and short story writer, known for his exploration of mid-20th century life.-Life:...

, Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin
Charles Bruce Chatwin was an English novelist and travel writer. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel On the Black Hill...

, William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

, ee cummings, Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. was an American short story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major American writer of the late 20th century and also a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s....

, Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore is an American fiction writer known mainly for her humorous and poignant short stories.-Biography:...

, and Joyce Johnson
Joyce Johnson
Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction who won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Minor Characters about her relationship with Jack Kerouac.-Personal life:...

.

She married fellow Guardian journalist Paul MacInnes in 2004, and they live in Dalston, East London.

External links

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