Dame Antonia Susan (A.S.) Byatt, the scholar and writer best known for her Booker Prize–winning novel Possession, is dead at 87. She died peacefully at home with family, according to a statement by her publisher. Byatt was both a critic-scholar and a novelist during her life, releasing 24 works, including both criticism and fiction, in her lifetime. Byatt was born in August 1936 in York, and attended Newnham College, Cambridge, and Bryn Mawr College before attending postgraduate studies at Somerville College in Oxford. Her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, was published by Chatto & Windus in 1964. By 1972, Byatt was working full-time as a lecturer in English and American literature at University College, London, though she left in 1983 to focus on writing.
Byatt’s most well-known work is 1990’s Possession: A Romance, a postmodern work set between the then–present day and Victorian England, following fictional poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The book won the Booker Prize upon its release, and it was called a “gloriously exhilarating novel of wit and romance.†She was later again shortlisted for a Booker Prize in 2009 for her novel The Children’s Book. Her last published work was a 2021 collection of short stories titled Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories.
“Antonia’s books are the most wonderful jewel-boxes of stories and ideas. Her compulsion to write (A4 blue notebook always to hand) and her ability to create intricate skeins of narrative was remarkable. It was always a treat to see her, to hear updates about her evolving literary characters and indulge in delicious titbits of literary gossip,†Clara Farmer, Byatt’s publisher at Chatto & Windus, said in the statement. “She could hold the germ of a story in her head for a long time, sometimes for years, but when it emerged she would work on it assiduously in her notebooks and in conversations, reading widely to clarify the background of intellectual movements and artistic ideas, and mapping every scene in detail in her head, from the colours of clothes and the names of minor characters — which were often bizarre — to the complexity of train timetables,†Jenny Uglow, her longtime editor, added in the statement. “Finally, the shape was fully formed in her mind. Then it would flow on to the page, with not a change to be made.â€