ABSTRACT
Born in the West Indies, this contemporary writer and academic teaches Literature, Creative Writing, and Feminist Theory at the University of Wales. Her first novel, Hallucinating Foucault (1996), might be described as a queer novel. It features a male PhD student’s quest for a gay French writer, Paul Michel, on whose work he is writing his thesis. The student’s quest is prompted by his girlfriend who, it turns out, is the daughter of a former lover’s of Paul Michel, and who herself made a life-long commitment to Paul Michel. Paul Michel, in turn, had mistaken her for a lovely boy when young. Hallucinating Foucault won Dillon’s First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize for the best first novel. Since then Duncker has published a collection of short stories, Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (1997), and James Miranda Barry (1999). The latter is a fictional account of a real-life character who was born as a biological woman but lived her life as a man. Various accounts of Barry’s life exist but little is known about the person. Barry served as an army doctor between 1813 and 1859, during which time his sexual identity was the object of some speculation although the facts of his biological womanhood were not known until after his death. Duncker’s novel belongs to a similar tradition as Jackie KAY’S novel Trumpet in that it tries to provide an imaginative account of a real-life figure, a biological woman who lived her life as a man.
(1912-90). British poet, novelist, and travel writer who was born in Julundar, India, of an Irish mother and a British civil engineer father. He returned to England in his late teens,
