Byatt, A. S. (1936-2023), was a British novelist, literary critic, and scholar. She gained international fame for her novel Possession (1990), which won the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom’s best-known literary award. The novel is a complex story that is part romance and part literary mystery. The story deals with an investigation by two modern English scholars into a love affair between two English poets of the late 1800’s.
Byatt was born in Sheffield, England, on Aug. 24, 1936. Her original name was Antonia Susan Drabble. Her sister is the noted English novelist Margaret Drabble. Antonia married Ian Byatt, a British economist, in 1959. She earned a B.A. degree from Cambridge University in 1957 and first gained recognition as a literary critic and scholar. Byatt taught in London from 1962 until 1983, when she devoted herself to writing. During her academic career, Byatt completed literary studies of the British novelist Iris Murdoch and the British poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Byatt wrote a series of four novels that trace English life during the mid-1900’s, beginning with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. The novels are The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002). Byatt’s first two novels were The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and The Game (1967). She also wrote the novel The Biographer’s Tale (2000), about a graduate student who writes a biography of a noted biographer. Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011) is a novel that retells the story of the end of the world from Norse mythology.
Byatt’s short fiction has been published in Sugar and Other Stories (1987), Angels and Insects: Two Novellas (1992), The Matisse Stories (1994), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Tales (1995), Little Black Book of Stories (2004), and Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories (2021). Her essays were collected in Passions of the Mind (1991) and On Histories and Stories (2002). In 1999, she received the title Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and became known as Dame Antonia Susan Byatt. She died on Nov. 16, 2023.
