Career
Barber worked for Penthouse magazine for seven years until 1974, being successively editorial assistant, literary editor, features editor and deputy editor; she left to have children. From 1982-89 she was a feature writer on the Sunday Express magazine and joined The Independent on Sunday in 1990. Barber has also written for Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Observer from 1996 to 2009. Best known for her interviews, she was once quoted by Will Self as describing her method as "start ... from a position of really disliking people, and then compel them to win you over." An interview with the conceptual artists Jake and Dinos Chapman was not a success: the Chapman Brothers have threatened to kill her if they ever meet again.
Barber has won five British press awards. Her books include two collections of interviews, Mostly Men and Demon Barber, a sex book How to Improve Your Man in Bed, and a survey of Victorian popular natural history writers, The Heyday of Natural History.
In 2006, Barber was one of the judges for the Turner Prize and wrote an article in The Observer critical of some aspects of the judging process. She currently appears on TV in Grumpy Old Women.
Barber's memoir of her teenage love affair, An Education, was published in June 2009. Its genesis was in a short piece on a similar theme that Barber wrote for British literary magazine Granta. Nick Hornby adapted this short article into a film of the same name, made by BBC Films and released in October 2009, and available on video from March 2010. In the meantime Barber had expanded the Granta article into her memoir; Hornby did not use Barber's book as source material for the film, just the Granta article.
It was announced in September 2009 that Barber would return to The Sunday Times later in the year writing for its magazine.
In July 2011, Barber was successfully sued by Sarah Thornton for libel and malicious falsehood over Barber's review of Seven Days in the Artworld that was published in the Daily Telegraph of 1 November 2008.
Read more about this topic: Lynn Barber
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
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