A. S. Byatt

Antonia Susan Byatt (born August 24, 1936, Sheffield, England) has been hailed by some as one of the great postmodern novelists in Britain. She is usually known as A. S. Byatt.

She was educated at the University of Cambridge, before teaching at the University of London and the Central School of Art and Design. Since becoming a full-time writer, Byatt has published several novels, including Possession which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1990. Two of her works have been adapted into motion pictures: Possession and Angels & Insects.

Also well-known for her short stories, Byatt is allegedly influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Browning, as she merges realism and naturalism with the fantasies of Victorian literature. Byatt prefers to offer fantasy not as an escape, but as an alternative to, everyday life, creating what is often termed a "hybrid genre", a combination of experimental and realistic work.

A. S. Byatt's first novel, Shadow of a Sun, the story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, was published in 1964 and was followed by The Game (1967), a study of the relationship between two sisters. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is the first book in a quartet about the members of a Yorkshire family. The story continues in Still Life (1985), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Babel Tower (1996). The fourth (and final) novel in the quartet is A Whistling Woman (2002).The quartet describes mid-20th-century Britain and Frederica's life as the quintessential bluestocking -- one of the first women to study at Cambridge and, later, a divorcée with a young son making a new life in London. Like "Babel Tower," "A Whistling Woman" covers the '60s and dips into the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the time.

Byatt's younger half-sister, Margaret Drabble, is also a successful novelist, and the rivalry between the two is legendary, although of uncertain origin. It has been suggested by some that, before becoming successful in her own right, Byatt resented her sister. Drabble herself suggests that part of the rift is due, after the death of Byatt's son in a car accident, to the guilt she felt that her own children survived (this reported by Suzie Mackenzie of the U.K.'s Guardian Unlimited.) Byatt has stated publicly that Drabble's depiction of their mother in Drabble's book The Peppered Moth angered her.

More recently, A. S. Byatt caused controversy by suggesting that the popularity of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of books is because they are "written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip." In her editorial column in the New York Times newspaper, she scathingly attacked adult readers of the series as uncultured, claiming that "they don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had."

After the column appeared in the newspaper, her editorial was described by Salon.com contributing writer Charles Taylor as "upfront in its snobbishness." He also suggested that Byatt's claims may be due to jealousy towards Rowling's commercial success, though given her vigorous defence of the novels of Terry Pratchett against mid-brow pundits this criticism seems particularly ill-founded.

In an article in the Guardian, the author Fay Weldon defended A.S.Byatt in this controversy over Harry Potter, and praised her courage for speaking out. "She is absolutely right that it is not what the poets hoped for, but this is not poetry, it is readable, saleable, everyday, useful prose," Weldon said. She said she found the sight of adults reading the Potter series troubling, adding: "Byatt does have a point in everything she says but at the same time she sounds like a bit of a spoilsport. She is being a party pooper but then the party pooper is often right."

Bibliography

• Shadow of a Sun Chatto & Windus, 1964
• Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch Chatto & Windus, 1965
• The Game Chatto & Windus, 1967
• Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time Nelson, 1970
• Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study Longman, 1976
• The Virgin in the Garden Chatto & Windus, 1978
• Still Life Chatto & Windus, 1985
• Sugar and Other Stories Chatto & Windus, 1987
• Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poetry and Life Hogarth Press, 1989
• George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (editor with Nicholas Warren) Penguin, 1990
• Possession: A Romance Chatto & Windus, 1990
• Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings Chatto & Windus, 1991
• Angels & Insects Chatto & Windus, 1992
• The Matisse Stories Chatto & Windus, 1993
• The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye Chatto & Windus, 1994
• Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (with Ignes Sodre) Chatto & Windus, 1995
• New Writing Volume 4 (editor with Alan Hollinghurst) Vintage, 1995
• Babel Tower Chatto & Windus, 1996
• New Writing Volume 6 (editor with Peter Porter) Vintage, 1997
• Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice Chatto & Windus, 1998
• Oxford Book of English Short Stories (editor) Oxford University Press, 1998
• On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays Chatto & Windus, 2000
• The Biographer's Tale Chatto & Windus, 2000
• Portraits in Fiction Chatto & Windus, 2001
• The Bird Hand Book (with photographs by Victor Schrager) Graphis (New York), 2001
• A Whistling Woman Chatto & Windus, 2002
• Little Black Book of Stories Chatto & Windus, 2003

Prizes and awards

• 1986 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award Still Life
• 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: A Romance
• 1995 Premio Malaparte (Italy)
• 1998 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
• 1999 DBE
• 2002 Shakespeare Prize (Germany)de:Antonia S. Byatt