A. S. Byatt

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (; 24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023), known professionally by her former married name, A.S. Byatt , was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

After attending the University of Cambridge, she married in 1959 and moved to Durham. It was during Byatt's time at university that she began working on her first two novels, subsequently published by Chatto & Windus as Shadow of a Sun (1964; reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title, The Shadow of the Sun) and The Game (1967). Byatt took a teaching job in 1972 to help pay for the education of her son. In the same week she accepted the teaching job, a drunk driver killed her son as he walked home from school. He was 11 years of age. Byatt spent a symbolic 11 years teaching, then began full-time writing in 1983. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) was the first of The Quartet, a tetralogy of novels that continued with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).

Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance received the 1990 Booker Prize, while her short story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994) received the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize and won the 2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her critical work includes two studies of Dame Iris Murdoch (who was a friend and mentor), Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976). Her other critical studies include Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970) and Portraits in Fiction (2001).

Byatt was awarded the Shakespeare Prize in 2002, the Erasmus Prize in 2016, the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2017 and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award in 2018. She was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Early life Antonia Susan Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, on 24 August 1936, The Drabble father participated in the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s. Her mother was a Shavian and her father was a Quaker. She attended Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College (in the United States), and Somerville College, Oxford. Having studied French, German, Latin and English at school, she later studied Italian while attending Cambridge so that she could read Dante. the Central School of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London. and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists." Byatt was an agnostic, though she maintained an affinity for Quaker services.

Byatt lived primarily in Putney, and died at home on 16 November 2023, at the age of 87.

Influences Byatt was influenced by Henry James and Darwinism Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the lives of two (fictional) 19th-century poets whom they are researching.

Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia was included in Angels & Insects (1992), which was turned into the eponymous 1995 film; that film received an Academy Award for Best Costume Design in 1997.

Byatt's novel The Biographer's Tale, published in 2000, she originally intended as a short story titled "The Biography of a Biographer", based on her notion of a biographer's life in a library investigating another person's life. Byatt initially intended to title the book The Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad March Hare.

Criticism Byatt wrote two critical studies of Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and another significant influence on her own writing. the Hawthornden Prize and the Booker.

Awards and honours

Byatt was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. and was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), "for services to Literature", in Elizabeth II's 1999 Birthday Honours. 1993: Honorary LittD from the University of Liverpool 1994: Honorary Doctorate from the University of Portsmouth 1995: Honorary Doctorate from the University of London 1999: Honorary DLitt from the University of Cambridge 1999: Honorary Fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge 2004: Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent 2004: Honorary Fellow, University College London 2008: The Times named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 2010: Honorary doctorate from Leiden University 2017: Fellow of the British Academy of the British Academy 2017: Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement

Literary 1986: PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, for Still Life

1990: Booker Prize for Fiction, for Possession: A Romance 1990: Irish Times International Fiction Prize, for Possession: A Romance 1991: Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book), for Possession: A Romance 1995: Premio Malaparte (Italy) 1995: Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, for The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye 1998: Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, for The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye 2002: Shakespeare Prize (Germany) 2009: Booker Prize shortlist, for The Children's Book 2010: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for The Children's Book 2016: Erasmus Prize (Netherlands), for "exceptional contribution to literature" 2017: Park Kyong-ni Prize (South Korea) 2018: Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award (Denmark)

Memberships

1987–1988: Kingman Committee of Inquiry into the teaching of English Language, (Department of Education and Science)

Works Novels The following books form a tetralogy known as The Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).

1964: Shadow of a Sun, Chatto & Windus reprinted in 1991 with originally intended title The Shadow of the Sun 1967: The Game, Chatto & Windus 1978: The Virgin in the Garden, Chatto & Windus 1985: Still Life, Chatto & Windus 1990: Possession: A Romance, Chatto & Windus 1996: Babel Tower, Chatto & Windus 2000: The Biographer's Tale, Chatto & Windus 2002: A Whistling Woman, Chatto & Windus 2009: The Children's Book, Chatto & Windus 2011: Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, Canongate

Short story collections 1987: Sugar and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus 1993: The Matisse Stories, Chatto & Windus 1994: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Chatto & Windus 1998: Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, Chatto & Windus 2003: Little Black Book of Stories, Chatto & Windus 2021: Medusa's Ankles: Selected Stories, Chatto & Windus

Novellas 1992: Angels and Insects, Chatto & Windus; comprises a pair of novellas: Morpho Eugenia The Conjugial Angel

Essays and biographies 1965: Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus 1970: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, Nelson 1976: Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study, Longman 1989: Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life, Hogarth Press 1991: Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings, Chatto & Windus 1995: Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (with Ignes Sodre), Chatto & Windus 2000: On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, Chatto & Windus 2001: Portraits in Fiction, Chatto & Windus 2016: Peacock & Vine: On William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, Knopf 2020: The Women Writers Handbook, Aurora Metro Books

Texts edited 1989: George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (editor with Nicholas Warren), Penguin 1995: New Writing Volume 4 (editor with Alan Hollinghurst), Vintage 1997: New Writing Volume 6 (editor with Peter Porter), Vintage 1998: Oxford Book of English Short Stories (editor), Oxford University Press 2001: The Bird Hand Book (with photographs by Victor Schrager), Graphis Inc. (New York)