Possession (Byatt)

Author Bio
• Aka—Antonia Susan Drabble Byatt
• Birth—August 24, 1936
• Where—Sheffield, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Cambridge University; undergraduate
   work, Bryn Mawr College (USA) and Oxford University
• Awards—Booker Prize
• Currently—lives in London, England, and France

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, DBE, known as A. S. Byatt is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, The Times newspaper named her on their list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Byatt was born as Antonia Susan Drabble, the daughter of John Drabble and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning. Byatt was educated at Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School, and 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 went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in the United States, and Somerville College, Oxford. Sister to novelist Margaret Drabble and art historian Helen Langdon, Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University (1962–71), the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.

Writing
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 won 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 female intellectual studying at Cambridge at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at that university, and then tracing her journey as a divorcee 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."

She has written critical studies of Iris Murdoch, who was a friend, mentor and a significant influence on her own writing. 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 past of two (fictional) nineteenth century poets whom they are researching. It won the Man Booker Prize in 1990 and was made into a film in 2002. Her novel Angels & Insects also became a successful film, nominated for an Academy Award (1995). The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

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."

Personal life
A. S. Byatt 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 has famously been long engaged in a feud with her novelist sister Margaret Drabble over the writerly appropriation of a family tea-set. The pair seldom see each other and don't read each other's books.

Prizes and awards

    1986 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, for Still Life
    1987 Hon. Dlitt, Bradford
    1990 Booker Prize for Fiction, Possession: A Romance
    1990 CBE
    1990 Irish Times International Fiction Prize Possession: A Romance
    1991 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) Possession
    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
    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[6] (Canada)
    2009 Man Booker Prize, The Children's Book (shortlist)
    2010 Honorary Doctorate from the Leiden University
    2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, The Children's Book