Nicola Barker was born in 1966 in Ely, Cambridgeshire, and emigrated aged nine-with her sister and parents-to South Africa. She returned to England in 1981, with her mother. After completing a poor-quality university degree in philosophy and English (which she claims made her 'socially useless') she worked for many years in a bakery in Soho, a bookmaker's off Oxford Street, and then at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Sick Children in Hackney, where she spent much of her time sterilizing breast milk.