The British writer Patricia Duncker participated in the University of Malta’s “Evenings on Campus” on the 24th July 2009. The reading at the Old University in Valletta was introduced by Professor Ivan Callus. Patricia Duncker read extracts from two novels: Hallucinating Foucault and Miss Webster and Cherif and a whole as yet unpublished short story Graven Image. The event was organised by Evening on Campus, in collaboration with the University of Malta's Department of English and the British Council.

The reading was followed by a question and answer session mediated by Petra Bianchi, director of the British Council in Malta and a book signing activity hosted by Miller Distributors Ltd.

“The event is a wonderful opportunity to meet one of the most vibrant and inventive novelists writing in English today, and the University will benefit from hosting someone who is well known for her role in the organisation of international literary festivals and in advising on Creative Writing initiatives", said Professor Ivan Callus, Head of the Department of English at the University of Malta, prior to the event. Professor Callus established contact with Patricia Duncker at the British Council’s Walberberg Seminar held in Berlin, Germany, in 2008.

Patricia Duncker was born in Kingston, Jamaica on 29 June 1951. She attended school in England and, after a period spent working in Germany, she read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She studied for a D.Phil. in English and German Romanticism at St Hugh's College, Oxford. From 1993-2002, she taught Literature at the University of Aberystwyth, and from 2002-2006, has been Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, teaching the MA in Prose Fiction. In January 2007, she moved to the University of Manchester where she is Professor of Modern Literature.

Her first novel, the acclaimed Hallucinating Foucault (1996), won the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize. Set mainly in France, the narrative centres on a Ph.D. student's obsessive search for his subject, the (fictional) French writer Paul Michel. Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees, a collection of short stories exploring themes of desire, jealousy and revenge, was published in 1997 and was shortlisted for the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. James Miranda Barry (1999) is a fictional account of the life of colonial doctor, transvestite, duelist and socialite Barry (1795-1865).

Her third novel, The Deadly Space Between (2002), is a disturbing psychological thriller about 18-year-old Toby Hawk and his mother's enigmatic new lover. A collection of provocative stories, Seven Tales of Sex and Death, was published in 2003. Her latest novel is Miss Webster and Chérif (2006), a comedy of errors set in the post 9/11 world with an indomitable leading character.