A. S. Byatt

Dame Antonia Susan Byatt (1936–2023) was one of the most learned and encyclopaedic novelists in British literature, known for fiction that combines narrative pleasure with deep engagement with art history, science, and Victorian culture. Born in Sheffield, she studied at Cambridge and Bryn Mawr and taught English at University College London. Her novels include The Shadow of the Sun (1964), The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Possession (1990), Angels and Insects (1992), The Biographer's Tale (2000), and The Children's Book (2009). Possession: A Romance won the Man Booker Prize in 1990 and has been widely translated and adapted. Her Frederica Potter tetralogy remains one of the most ambitious novelistic projects in post-war British literature. She was made DBE in 1999. Her fiction is distinguished by its density of reference, its pleasure in ideas and things, and its sustained engagement with the interplay of past and present. The Children's Book (2009), a vast panorama of Edwardian England from the Arts and Crafts movement through the First World War, won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Byatt is the sister of novelist Margaret Drabble.