| 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 best-seller status in
the United States in 1990 with her Booker Prize-winning novel
Possession:
A Romance, a story about a clandestine love affair
between two Victorian writers and the two modern-day academics
who unearth their secret; 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 quartet of novels about the
1950s and 1960s (The
Virgin in the Garden, Still
Life, Babel
Tower and A
Whistling Woman), The
Little Black Book of Stories, and A
Whistling Woman. Her critical work includes Degrees
of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch, Passions
of the Mind: Selected Essays and On
Histories and Stories. She is also the co-editor
of Memory:
An Anthology, edited with Harriet Harvey Wood, a
non-fiction collection of essays. In 2009 her latest novel,
The
Children’s Book, will be published in the UK and
the US.
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 |
