Clive Barker (born October 5, 1952, Liverpool) is an English author, film director and visual artist.

Before reaching college, he went to, as he has often boasted, all the same schools as John Lennon. He studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University.

Barker is one of the leading authors of contemporary horror/fantasy, starting out with pure horror writing early in his career, mostly in the form of short stories (collected in Books of Blood 1 - 6), and the Faustian novel The Damnation Game (1986). Later he moved towards epic modern-day fantasy with some horror elements in Imajica (1991) and Sacrament (1996). Barker's distinctive style is characterized by the notion of hidden fantastical worlds existing side by side with our own (an idea he shares with contemporary Neil Gaiman), the role of sexuality in the supernatural and the construction of coherent, complex and detailed mythologies. Barker has referred to this style as "dark fantasy" or the "fantastique."