| A.S.
Byatt could be the patron saint of bookworms. She describes
her often-bedridden childhood self as having been “kept
alive by fictions”—mostly the novels of Dickens,
Austen, and Scott. She has always been a self-described greedy
reader, who weaves her many interests — biology, history,
philosophy among them — into her work. The results are
novels with, as she has often stated, “the whole world
in them;” books that teem with characters and ideas, books
in which reading and writing usually prove a matter of life,
death, and freedom.
Already a formidable
literary figure in England, A.S. Byatt achieved bestseller status
in the United States with her Booker Prize-winning novel Possession:
A Romance; the novel was made into a film in 2002. Her novella
Morpho Eugenia, in which she examines the similarities between
anthills and 19th century manor households, was made into the
film “Angels and Insects.”Byatt’s
other fiction includes The
Biographer's Tale, The
Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, The
Matisse Stories and the recently-completed quartet of novels
about the 1950s and 1960s (The
Virgin in the Garden, Still
Life, Babel
Tower and A
Whistling Woman), and The
Little Black Book of Stories. Her critical work includes
Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch, Passions
of the Mind: Selected Essays and On
Histories and Stories. A
Whistling Woman was released in trade paperback in April
2004. She is most recently the co-editor of Memory:
An Anthology, edited with Harriet Harvey Wood, a non-fiction
collection of essays.
Born in Yorkshire, England,
A.S. Byatt read English at Cambridge and continued her studies
at Bryn Mawr (PA) and Oxford. She taught English and American
literature at University College in London before returning
to full-time writing in 1983. Byatt has served as chairman of
the Society of Authors and was also a member of the Kingman
Committee on the Teaching of English. In 1999 she was made a
Dame of the British Empire, honors which recognized her work
as a writer and her overall service and contributions to the
United Kingdom. In 2002 she received the German Toepfer Foundation’s
Shakespeare Prize for distinguished contributions to British
culture. She is translated into 28 languages. A distinguished
critic and regular contributor to many British and American
newspapers, as well as to The New Yorker magazine, Byatt
has also served as a judge of various literary prizes, including
the Booker Prize.
•••
“A.S. Byatt is
a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne
for a thousand and one nights.”
—The New York
Times Book Review |
