A. S. Byatt

Dame

A. S. Byatt

DBE HonFBA
Byatt in 2007
Byatt in 2007
BornAntonia Susan Drabble
(1936-08-24)24 August 1936
Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Died16 November 2023(2023-11-16) (aged 87)
London, England
Occupation
  • Critic
  • novelist
  • short-story writer
  • poet
Alma mater
Period1964–2016
Spouses
​
​
(m. 1959; div. 1969)​
Peter Duffy
​
(m. 1969)​
Children4
Relatives
Website
asbyatt.com Edit this at Wikidata

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (née Drabble; 24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023), known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt (/ˈbaɪ.ət/ BY-ət),[1] was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.[2][3]

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, 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,[4] 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.[5]

  1. ^ Sangster, Catherine (14 September 2009). "How to Say: JM Coetzee and other Booker authors". BBC News. Retrieved 1 October 2009.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference The Paris Review was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ "Honorary Fellows". Newnham College. Archived from the original on 21 October 2020.
  4. ^ Newman, Jenny; Friel, James (2003). "An interview with A. S. Byatt". Cercles. Retrieved 11 September 2010.
  5. ^ "Murakami Projected to Win the Nobel Prize". Poets & Writers. 2012.