A. S. Byatt facts for kids

A. S. Byatt
Quick facts for kids Dame ; A. S. Byatt ; DBE
	Byatt in June 2007 in Lyon, France; (Photo by Seamus Kearney)
Born	Antonia Susan Drabble; 24 August 1936 (age 84); Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Occupation	Writer, poet
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Newnham College, Cambridge; Bryn Mawr College; Somerville College, Oxford;
Period	1964–present
Notable awards	Booker Prize

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy DBE (née Drabble; born 24 August 1936), known professionally as A. S. Byatt ( BY-ət), is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner, and won the 2017 Park Kyong-ni Prize. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Biography

Byatt was born in Sheffield as Antonia Susan Drabble, the eldest child of John Drabble, QC, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning. Her sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon. Her brother Richard Drabble QC is a barrister. As a result of the bombing of Sheffield during the Second World War the family moved to York.

Byatt's upbringing was fairly unhappy as she struggled against her domineering mother. She was educated at two independent boarding schools, Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School in York. She noted in an interview in 2009, "I am not a Quaker, of course, because I'm anti-Christian and the Quakers are a form of Christianity but their religion is wonderful – you simply sat in silence and listened to the nature of things."

She did not enjoy boarding school, citing her need to be alone and her difficulty in making friends. She went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxford. Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of the University of London (1962–71), the Central School of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.

She married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and had a daughter, as well as a son who was killed in a car accident at the age of 11. The marriage was dissolved in 1969. She has two daughters with her second husband Peter John Duffy.

Byatt's relationship with her sister Margaret Drabble has sometimes been strained due to the presence of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship is no longer especially close and they do not read each other's books, Drabble describes the situation as "normal sibling rivalry" and Byatt says it has been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists" and that the sisters "always have liked each other on the bottom line."

Writing career

The story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, Byatt's first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, was published in 1964. Her novel The Game (1967) charts the dynamics between two sisters, and the family theme is continued in her quartet The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002), Still Life winning the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1989. Her quartet of novels is inspired by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love.

Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Potter, a young intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then tracing her journey as a divorcée with a young son making a new life in London. Byatt says some of the characters in her fiction represent her "greatest terror which is simple domesticity [...] I had this image of coming out from under and seeing the light for a bit and then being shut in a kitchen, which I think happened to women of my generation." Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s. She describes herself as "a naturally pessimistic animal": "I don't believe that human beings are basically good, so I think all utopian movements are doomed to fail, but I am interested in them."

In those books and other works, Byatt alludes to, and builds upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature. She conceives of fantasy as an alternative to, rather than an escape from, everyday life, and it is often difficult to tell when the fantastic in her work actually represents the eruption of psychosis. "In my work", she notes "writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers." Possession (1990) parallels the emerging relationship of two contemporary academics with the lives of two (fictional) 19th-century poets whom they are researching. It won the Booker Prize in 1990 and was made into a film in 2002. Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia, included in Angels & Insects (1992), was turned into the successful film also called Angels & Insects (1995), nominated for an Academy Award. Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

She has written critical studies of Dame Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and a significant influence on her own writing. Also known for her short stories, Byatt has been influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning, in merging realism and naturalism with fantasy. Her story collections include Sugar and Other Stories (1987); The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), a collection of fairy tales; Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998); and Little Black Book of Stories (2003). The Matisse Stories (1993) features three pieces, each describing a painting by Henri Matisse, each the tale of an initially smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives. Her books reflect a continuous interest in zoology, entomology, geology, and Darwinism among other repeated themes. Byatt has written for media including the British journal Prospect, The Guardian, The Times and The Times Literary Supplement. She has been a judge on many literary award panels including the Hawthornden Prize, the Booker, David Higham Prize for Fiction, and the Betty Trask Award.

On the role of writing in her life, she says: "I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person that has the project of making a thing. Well, that's putting it pompously – but constructing. I do see it in sort of three-dimensional structures. And because that person does that all the time, that person is able to love all these people."

Memberships

Byatt (Amsterdam, 2011)

1974–77 Social Effects of Television Advisory Group BBC
1977–1982 Associate of Newnham College, Cambridge
1978–1984 Board of Communications and Cultural Studies, CNAA
1985–87 Board of Creative and Performing Arts, CNAA
1987–88 Kingman Committee of Inquiry into the teaching of English Language, (Department of Education and Science)
1984–88 Management Committee, Society of Authors, (Deputy chairman, 1986, Chairman, 1986–88)
1993–98 Board, British Council, (Member of Literature Advisory Panel, 1990–98)
2014 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Foreign Honorary Member

Prizes and awards

1986 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, for Still Life
1987 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bradford
1990 CBE
1990 Booker Prize for Fiction, Possession: A Romance
1990 Irish Times International Fiction Prize Possession: A Romance
1991 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) Possession: A Romance
1991 Honorary Doctorate from the University of York
1991 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Durham
1992 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Nottingham
1993 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liverpool
1994 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Portsmouth
1995 Honorary Doctorate from the University of London
1995 Premio Malaparte (Italy)
1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
1998 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
1999 DBE "for services to Literature"
1999 Hon. DLitt from the University of Cambridge
2000 Hon. Fellow, London Institute
2000 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sheffield
2004 Honorary Doctorate from the University of Kent
2004 Fellow, University College London
2002 Shakespeare Prize (Germany)
2007 Honorary degree from the University of Winchester.
2009 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix (Canada)
2009 Man Booker Prize, The Children's Book (shortlist)
2010 Honorary Doctorate from Leiden University
2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Children's Book
2016 Erasmus Prize
2017 Fellow of the British Academy of the British Academy
2017 Park Kyong-ni Prize
2017 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
2018 Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award

Works

Fiction

1964 – The Shadow of the Sun, Chatto & Windus
1967 – The Game, Chatto & Windus
1978 – The Virgin in the Garden, Chatto & Windus
1985 – Still Life, Chatto & Windus
1990 – Possession: A Romance, Chatto & Windus
1992 – Angels and Insects, 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 ISBN: 9780802120847

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

Essays and biographies

1965 Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus
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 ISBN: 978-1101947470

Texts edited

1970 Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time, Nelson
1976 Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study, Longman
1990 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)