A. S. Byatt - WikiHQ

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, 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

thumb|Byatt, pictured in [[Amsterdam in 2011]]

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).