Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Duncker attended Bedales school in England and, after a period spent working in Germany, read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She earned a doctorate from St Hugh's College, Oxford.

She has taught at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and the University of East Anglia. In January 2007, she was appointed Professor of Contemporary Writing at the University of Manchester.

Fiction

• Hallucinating Foucault (novel, 1996) (McKitterick Prize, 1997)
• James Miranda Barry (novel, 1999), published in the USA as "The Doctor"
• The Deadly Space Between (novel, 2002)
• Miss Webster and Chérif (novel, 2006)
• The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (novel, 2009)

• Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees (short stories, 1997)
• Seven Tales of Sex and Death (short stories, 2003)

Non-fiction / academic (selection)

• Writing on the Wall: Selected Essays (2002)
• "The Suggestive Spectacle: Queer Passions in Brontë's Villette and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", Theorising Muriel Spark: Gender, Race Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, ed. Martin McQuillan (2002) 67-77.
• "Mary Shelley's Afterlives: Biography and Invention", Women: A Cultural Review, Special Issue "Hystorical Fictions" [sic], Vol.15, No.2 (Summer 2004) 230-249.
• "Katherine Mansfield: The Writer of the Submerged World", Interrupted Lives in Literature, ed. Andrew Motion (2004), 53-65.
• Introduction to the new Penguin edition and new translation by Helen Constantine of Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (2005)
• "Writer's Writer: Patricia Duncker on George Eliot", New Welsh Review No.74 (Winter 2006) 93-95.