AS Byatt, an author and critic who won the Booker Prize, has died. He was 87 years old.
Her publisher told everyone on Friday, November 17, that she had died peacefully at home with her family by her side.
The author, whose real name was Dame Antonia Byatt, won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1990 for Possession, a book about two academics who fall in love while studying the relationship between made-up Victorian poets.
A romance mystery called Possession was made into a movie in 2002. It starred Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Toby Stephens, and Tom Hollander.
The fantasy drama Three Thousand Years of Longing, starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, was based on her 1995 short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.” The movie has a conversation between a genie and an academic in an Istanbul hotel room.
This is what her publisher at Chatto & Windus, a Penguin Random House imprint, said about her books: “Antonia’s books are the most wonderful jewel boxes of stories and ideas.”
“She had to write all the time (an A4 blue notebook was always nearby) and was amazingly good at weaving complex stories together.” When I saw her, it was always a treat to hear about how her characters were changing and to enjoy juicy literary rumors.
“Like all of Chatto’s publishers before me, I loved her and her writing.”
“Her 60th (Diamond) anniversary as a Chatto author would have been in 2024,” the statement said.
“We are sad about her death, but it gives us hope that her deep writings will continue to haunt and amaze readers for years to come.”
Antonia Drabble Byatt was born in Sheffield in 1936. She studied English at Cambridge and then went on to study more at Oxford and Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia.
She moved to Durham after getting married to economist Ian Byatt in 1959. They had two kids together. One of them, Charles, died when he was 11 years old and was hit by a drunk driver. In 1969, they got a divorce.
Byatt taught at several London schools, such as the Central School of Art and Design and University College London, since the 1960s before she started writing full-time in 1983.
Martha Drabble, her younger sister, is also an author. People often called them “feuding” because of their rough relationship and the fact that both of their books were about complicated family relationships.
The Shadow of the Sun and her quartet of books called The Quartet—The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002) are some of Byatt’s most famous works.
She got a CBE in 1990, and on Elizabeth II’s birthday in 1999, it was raised to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for “services to literature.”
Byatt was nominated for the Booker Prize again in 2009 for The Children’s Book, a book set in the 19th century about creative families and wartime creativity.
Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories, her most recent book, came out in 2021.
She lived with her husband, Peter Duffy, in Putney, southwest London. He has since died.
