Novelist, critic and poet Dame AS Byatt has died at the age of 87, her publisher has announced.
The renowned writer, whose full name was Antonia Susan Byatt, won the Booker Prize for her 1990 novel Possession.
In a statement, Penguin Random House said they were “deeply saddened” to announce her death.
They described her as “one of the most significant writers and critics of our time”. The author of the 1990 Booker Prize-winning novel Possession studied for her postgraduate degree at Somerville College, Oxford. She taught in the Extra-Mural Department of London University and the Central School of Art and Design, and in 1972 became full-time lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London. She left in 1983 to concentrate on writing full-time.
A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. Her first novel, Shadow of a Sun, appeared in 1964, the year after A Summer Bird-Cage, the first novel by her sister, Margaret Drabble, was published, thus establishing the notorious and possibly exaggerated rivalry between them. It was followed by studies of Iris Murdoch, of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and by another novel, The Game (1967).
In 1972, she endured the death of her 11-year-old son, Charles, knocked down and killed by a car. The experience marked her deeply. She continued to teach and she sat on committees, but for a decade the creative springs were dried up in her. There is no compensation, she said to interviewers who asked about such compensations, for the death of a child except that if you survive, youre a bit tougher. But it taught her about the machinery of grief.
Her creative career started again in 1978 with The Virgin in the Garden, the first of what would prove to be a remarkable tetralogy of novels, and a long, complex narrative of a small community and its school in Yorkshire celebrating in the coronation year of 1953, the start of a new Elizabethan age.
To some extent the creation of fiction had become necessary to her as a complement (or antidote) to her teaching work at University College London, as a kind of private gesture against an excessively theoretical academic environment. It was evident, she wrote acerbically, that what writers there were in the 1970s were not coming out of English departments: it therefore seemed better not to go into one.
The Virgin in the Garden was well received, and was followed by Still Life (1985), which included the chance death by electrocution of one of the main characters from the first novel, and an emphasis on the accidental element in human life and death.
Her reputation (until then, that of a literary novelist with slightly intimidating intellectual qualifications) was transformed by the publication in 1990 of Possession, which was to win the Booker prize and become a slightly surprising bestseller worldwide, and, in 2002, a film. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award. Dame Antonia’s work was translated into 38 languages.
Penguin said: “She died peacefully at home surrounded by close family. A girl from Sheffield with a strong European sensibility, Antonia had a remarkable mind which produced a unique creative vision.” Dame Antonia was also known for writing 2009’s the Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Her most recent publication was a collection of short stories – 2021’s Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories (2021). Dame Antonia has three daughters and after the death of her only son, she wrote the poem, Dead Boys, which described how a child is perpetually present after their death, at every age, to their mother.
