Author A.S. Byatt, whose books embody the Booker Prize-winning novel “Possession,” has died at the age of 87.
Peter Jordan/AP
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Peter Jordan/AP
Author A.S. Byatt, whose books embody the Booker Prize-winning novel “Possession,” has died at the age of 87.
Peter Jordan/AP
LONDON — British writer A.S. Byatt, who wove historical past, fable and a pointy eye for human foibles into books that included the Booker Prize-winning novel “Possession,” has died at the age of 87.
Byatt’s writer, Chatto & Windus, stated Friday that the writer, whose full identify was Antonia Byatt, died “peacefully at home surrounded by close family” on Thursday.
Byatt wrote two dozen books, beginning along with her first novel, “The Shadow of the Sun,” in 1964. Her work was translated into 38 languages.
“Possession,” printed in 1990, follows two younger lecturers investigating the lives of a pair of imaginary Victorian poets. The novel, a double romance which skillfully layers a contemporary story with mock-Victorian letters and poems, was an enormous bestseller and gained the prestigious Booker Prize.
Accepting the prize, Byatt stated “Possession” was about the pleasure of studying.
“My book was written on a kind of high about the pleasures of reading,” she stated.
“Possession” was tailored into a 2002 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart. It was one in all a number of Byatt books to get the movie remedy. “Morpho Eugenia,” a gothic Victorian novella included in the 1992 e book “Angels and Insects,” grew to become a 1995 film of the similar identify, starring Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Her quick story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” which gained the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, impressed the 2022 fantasy movie “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” Directed by “Mad Max” filmmaker George Miller, it starred Idris Elba as a genie who spins tales for an instructional performed by Tilda Swinton.
Byatt’s different books embody 4 novels set in 1950s and ’60s Britain that collectively are often known as the Frederica Quartet: “The Virgin in the Garden,” printed in 1978, adopted by “Still Life,” “Babel Tower” and “A Whistling Woman.” She additionally wrote the 2009 Booker Prize finalist “The Children’s Book,” a sweeping story of Edwardian England centered on a author of fairy tales.
Her most up-to-date e book was “Medusa’s Ankles,” a quantity of quick tales printed in 2021.
Byatt’s literary agent, Zoe Waldie, stated the writer “held readers spellbound” with writing that was “multi-layered, endlessly varied and deeply intellectual, threaded through with myths and metaphysics.”
Clara Farmer, Byatt’s writer at Chatto & Windus — a part of Penguin Random House — stated the writer’s books have been “the most wonderful jewel-boxes of stories and ideas.”
“We mourn her loss, but it’s a comfort to know that her penetrating works will dazzle, shine and refract in the minds of readers for generations to come,” Farmer stated.
Born Antonia Susan Drabble in Sheffield, northern England, in 1936 – her sister is novelist Margaret Drabble – Byatt grew up in a Quaker household, attended Cambridge University and labored for a time as a college lecturer.
She married economist Ian Byatt in 1959 they usually had a daughter and a son earlier than divorcing. In 1972, her 11-year-old son, Charles, was struck and killed by a automotive whereas strolling residence from faculty.
Charles died shortly after Byatt had taken a instructing put up at University College London to pay for his non-public faculty charges. After his demise, she informed The Guardian in 2009, she stayed in the job “as long as he had lived, which was 11 years.” In 1983, she stop to turn into a full-time author.
Byatt lived in London along with her second husband, Peter Duffy, with whom she had two daughters.
Queen Elizabeth II made Byatt a dame, the feminine equal of a knight, in 1999 for companies to literature, and in 2003 she was made a chevalier (knight) of France’s Order of Arts and Letters.
In 2014, a species of iridescent beetle was named for her — Euhylaeogena byattae Hespenheide — in honor of her depiction of naturalists in “Morpho Eugenia.”