Writer A.S. Byatt, whose books embody the Booker Prize-winning novel “Possession,” has died on the age of 87. Peter Jordan/AP conceal caption
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Peter Jordan/AP
Writer A.S. Byatt, whose books embody the Booker Prize-winning novel “Possession,” has died on the age of 87.
Peter Jordan/AP
LONDON — British writer A.S. Byatt, who wove historical past, fable and a pointy eye for human foibles into books that included the Booker Prize-winning novel “Possession,” has died on the age of 87.
Byatt’s writer, Chatto & Windus, stated Friday that the writer, whose full identify was Antonia Byatt, died “peacefully at residence surrounded by shut household” on Thursday.
Byatt wrote two dozen books, beginning together with her first novel, “The Shadow of the Solar,” in 1964. Her work was translated into 38 languages.
“Possession,” printed in 1990, follows two younger teachers investigating the lives of a pair of imaginary Victorian poets. The novel, a double romance which skillfully layers a contemporary story with mock-Victorian letters and poems, was an enormous bestseller and received the celebrated Booker Prize.
Accepting the prize, Byatt stated “Possession” was concerning the pleasure of studying.
“My e-book was written on a sort of excessive concerning the pleasures of studying,” she stated.
“Possession” was tailored into a 2002 movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart. It was one in all a number of Byatt books to get the movie therapy. “Morpho Eugenia,” a gothic Victorian novella included within the 1992 e-book “Angels and Bugs,” turned a 1995 film of the identical identify, starring Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Her quick story “The Djinn within the Nightingale’s Eye,” which received the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, impressed the 2022 fantasy movie “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” Directed by “Mad Max” filmmaker George Miller, it starred Idris Elba as a genie who spins tales for a tutorial performed by Tilda Swinton.
Byatt’s different books embody 4 novels set in Nineteen Fifties and ’60s Britain that collectively are often known as the Frederica Quartet: “The Virgin within the Backyard,” printed in 1978, adopted by “Nonetheless Life,” “Babel Tower” and “A Whistling Lady.” She additionally wrote the 2009 Booker Prize finalist “The Youngsters’s E book,” a sweeping story of Edwardian England centered on a author of fairy tales.
Her most up-to-date e-book was “Medusa’s Ankles,” a quantity of quick tales printed in 2021.
Byatt’s literary agent, Zoe Waldie, stated the writer “held readers spellbound” with writing that was “multi-layered, endlessly diverse and deeply mental, threaded via with myths and metaphysics.”
Clara Farmer, Byatt’s writer at Chatto & Windus — a part of Penguin Random Home — stated the writer’s books have been “essentially the most great jewel-boxes of tales and concepts.”
“We mourn her loss, nevertheless it’s a consolation to know that her penetrating works will dazzle, shine and refract within the minds of readers for generations to come back,” Farmer stated.
Born Antonia Susan Drabble in Sheffield, northern England, in 1936 – her sister is novelist Margaret Drabble – Byatt grew up in a Quaker household, attended Cambridge College and labored for a time as a college lecturer.
She married economist Ian Byatt in 1959 and so they had a daughter and a son earlier than divorcing. In 1972, her 11-year-old son, Charles, was struck and killed by a automobile whereas strolling residence from college.
Charles died shortly after Byatt had taken a educating put up at College Faculty London to pay for his personal college charges. After his demise, she advised The Guardian in 2009, she stayed within the job “so long as he had lived, which was 11 years.” In 1983, she stop to turn out to be a full-time author.
Byatt lived in London together with her second husband, Peter Duffy, with whom she had two daughters.
Queen Elizabeth II made Byatt a dame, the feminine equal of a knight, in 1999 for companies to literature, and in 2003 she was made a chevalier (knight) of France’s Order of Arts and Letters.
In 2014, a species of iridescent beetle was named for her — Euhylaeogena byattae Hespenheide — in honor of her depiction of naturalists in “Morpho Eugenia.”
