Biography

A. S. Byatt
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Photo: © Michael Trevillion
Biography
Dame A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt was born on 24 August 1936 in Yorkshire. She was educated at a Quaker school in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied as a postgraduate. She taught in the Extra-Mural Department of London University and the Central School of Art and Design, and in 1972 became full-time Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London (Senior Lecturer, 1981). She left in 1983 to concentrate on writing full-time. She has travelled widely overseas to lecture and talk about her work, often with the British Council, and was Chairman of the Society of Authors between 1986 and 1988. She was a member of the Literature Advisory Panel for the British Council between 1990 and 1998. She has served on the judging panels for a number of literary prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction, and is recognised as a distinguished critic, contributing regularly to journals and newspapers including the Times Literary Supplement, The Independent and the Sunday Times, as well as to BBC radio and television programmes. She was also a member of the Kingman Commitee on the Teaching of English Language (1987-8).A. S. Byatt's first novel, Shadow of a Sun, the story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, was published in 1964 and was followed by The Game (1967), a study of the relationship between two sisters. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is the first book in a quartet about the members of a Yorkshire family. The story continues in Still Life (1985), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Babel Tower (1996). The fourth (and final) novel in the quartet is A Whistling Woman (2002).Her most successful book, Possession: A Romance (1990), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and continues to enjoy enormous critical and popular success. Part romance, part literary thriller, the story involves two contemporary academics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, whose research into the lives of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, reveal inextricably linked destinies, like those of their researchers. Angels & Insects (1992) consists of two novellas, The Conjugal Angel, an exploration of Victorian attitudes toward death and mourning, and Morpho Eugenia, the story of a young Victorian explorer and naturalist, William Adamson, and his relationship with the daughter of his employer, adapted as a film in 1996. Her novel The Biographer's Tale was published in 2000.A. S. Byatt's collections of short stories and fictions include Sugar and Other Stories (1987); The Matisse Stories (1993), three stories each with a connection to a particular Matisse painting; The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), a collection of fairy tales; and Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998). Her published criticism includes two books about Iris Murdoch: Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976), as well as Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970). In A. S. Byatt's last book, Portraits in Fiction (2001), she writes about instances of painting in novels, with examples from work by Zola, Proust and Iris Murdoch, a subject she first explored in a lecture given at London's National Portrait Gallery in 2000. She was awarded a CBE in 1990 and a DBE in 1999, and in 2002 was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in recognition of her contribution to British culture. Her latest book, Little Black Book of Short Stories (2003), is a new collection of short stories.A. S. Byatt lives in London. Her sister is the novelist Margaret Drabble.

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