Obituaries

My Mum was an English literature teacher and a big fan of both authors (she met them on different occasions) and it was only her obit on the radio that made the penny drop that Byatt and Margaret Drabble were sisters.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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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