A.S. Byatt

The Drabble father participated in the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s.

The mother was a Shavian and the father a Quaker.

As a result of the bombing of Sheffield during the Second World War the family moved to York.

Byatt was educated at two independent boarding schools, Sheffield High School and The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York.

An unhappy child, Byatt did not enjoy boarding school, citing her need to be alone and her difficulty in making friends.

Severe asthma often kept her in bed where reading became an escape from a difficult household.

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.

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (Drabble; 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.

Antonia Susan Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, on 24 August 1936, as the eldest child of John Frederick Drabble, QC, later a County Court judge, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning.

Her sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon.

Her brother Richard Drabble KC is a barrister.

After attending the University of Cambridge, she married in 1959 and moved to Durham.

Byatt married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and moved to Durham.

They had a daughter together, as well as a son, Charles, who was killed by a drunk-driver at the age of 11 while walking home from school.

She spoke of her son's death and its influence on her lecturing and subsequent career after publishing The Children's Book, in which the image of a dead child features.

She came to regard her academic career symbolically.

She later wrote the poem "Dead Boys".

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.

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).

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).

The marriage was dissolved in 1969.

Later that year, Byatt married Peter Duffy, and they had two daughters.

Byatt's relationship with her sister Margaret Drabble was sometimes strained due to the presence of autobiographical elements in both their writing.

While their relationship was no longer especially close and they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation as "normal sibling rivalry" and Byatt said it had been "terribly overstated by gossip columnists."

Byatt was an agnostic, though she maintained an affinity for Quaker services.

She enjoyed watching snooker, tennis, and football.

Byatt lived primarily in Putney, and died at home on 16 November 2023, at the age of 87.

Her other critical studies include Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970) and Portraits in Fiction (2001).

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.

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 spent a symbolic 11 years teaching, then began full-time writing in 1983.

She began writing full-time in 1983.

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.

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.

Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize and won the 2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.