Contemporary fiction is going through a “so what” moment, with very few novels generating a real sense of passion in readers, the Booker prize-winning novelist Pat Barker has said.

She said fiction, or the reading of fiction, was not in good health. It is less #MeToo, she told the Cheltenham literature festival on Sunday. “It is the so what moment.

“Even among very enthusiastic modern readers of fiction there is the ‘so what’ movement where you put down a book and you’ve been entertained by the story of contemporary life or mores, or whatever, and you think, ‘yes but so what’.

“Perhaps it is just me, perhaps I’m out of love with fiction. I fall in and out of love with fiction quite often.”

Barker, whose books include Regeneration and Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995, said there was an absence of fiction that addressed the needs of a particular group, giving as an example the novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, which spoke so powerfully to black women in America.

“There are moments when people of a particular group are absolutely falling on the next book because it was addressing the essential needs of their life. I think fiction is at its absolute best when it does that, and I don’t think we’re in such a moment now.”

She said so much mainstream fiction “you enjoy, you admire” but “do you fall on it in the same way that a child of 10 falls on a novel by their favourite writer? I don’t think we very frequently do.”

Barker said fiction was going out of fashion and that may be a reason why so many writers were going back to ancient stories and retelling them – a club she is currently part of.

Her latest novel, The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of The Iliad and has been described as “a feminist Iliad”. Barker’s main character is Briseis, the woman awarded to Achilles.

Barker was being interviewed at Cheltenham by the classicist Mary Beard and they got on to the subject of the recent BBC TV series Troy. Neither appeared to be fans.

Beard said: “They got absolutely fixated about whether Achilles should be black … he didn’t exist!”