Steven Barclay Agency

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.