Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, who wrote under the name AS Byatt, authored complex and critically acclaimed novels, including the Booker prize-winning Possession and her examination of artistic creation, The Children’s Book. Over her career, she won a swathe of literary awards, from the Booker to a Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters.
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Born Antonia Drabble in 1936, Byatt grew up in Sheffield and York, before studying English at Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia and at Oxford. She began teaching at University College London in 1962, publishing her first novel, Shadows of a Sun, two years later. The complicated family relationships found in much of her fiction were already in evidence with this story of a daughter escaping a domineering father. A novel of rival sisters that followed in 1967 – appearing two years after her sister, the author Margaret Drabble, published her own novel on a similar theme – added mythological and symbolic elements, which became central to Byatt’s later work.
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The writer and critic AS Byatt, who explored family, myth and narrative in a career spanning six decades, has died aged 87.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, who wrote under the name AS Byatt, authored complex and critically acclaimed novels, including the Booker prize-winning Possession and her examination of artistic creation, The Children’s Book.
“We mourn her loss but it’s a comfort to know that her penetrating works will dazzle, shine and refract in the minds of readers for generations to come,” said her publisher Clara Farmer.
Born Antonia Drabble in 1936, Byatt grew up in Sheffield and York, before studying English at Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia and at Oxford.
Refracting one liaison through the lens of another, Byatt layers 20th-century scholarly intrigue with invented journals and almost 2,000 lines of poetry which the author said “came easily … written as they were needed in the shape of the novel, as part of the run of words”.
In 2014, a coleopterist working in Central and South America named a species of beetle – Euhylaeogena Byattae Hespenheide – in her honour, inspired by her portrayal of naturalists in the novella Morpho Eugenia.
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