Antonia Susan Byatt was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, on 24 July 1936, the eldest of four children. Her father, John Drabble, was a barrister, and her mother, Marie Bloor, a schoolteacher who had been an early female graduate of Cambridge University. Byatt attended Sheffield High School and later The Mount School, York (a Quaker foundation), before studying English at Newnham College, Cambridge, from which she graduated in 1957.
Byatt’s career as a writer and critic is ineluctably divided into two periods, with the dividing line occurring in the fall of 1990, when she won the Booker Prize with her novel Possession. For once in the troubled history of the prize, it seemed as though most of the elements that ought to make up its success had come together. Here was a novel of astonishing
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Citation: Todd, Richard. "A. S. Byatt". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2002; last revised 13 July 2011. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12494, accessed 31 October 2024.]
