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Dame Antonia Susan Byatt, DBE, (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.

Life and career

Byatt was educated at the Newnham College, University of Cambridge, Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, USA and Somerville College, University of Oxford, though her research grant to the latter institution (dependent on single status) ended with her first marriage. She lectured at London University extra-murally, the Central School of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1981 at University College London. Since becoming a full-time writer, Byatt has published several novels, most notably A Romance, 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 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 because Drabble gained a starred double-first over her own mere double-first. 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 UK's Guardian Unlimited.) Byatt has stated publicly that Drabble's depiction of their mother in Drabble's book The Peppered Moth angered her.

The Harry Potter controversy

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.

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."

She was awarded a CBE in 1990, then advanced a DBE in 1999.

Bibliography

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)

She has been granted the title of "Duchess of Morpho Eugenia" by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, claimant to the micronational title of king of Redonda.

External links

1936 births | Living people | Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge | Booker Prize winners | English novelists | English short story writers | O. Henry Award winners | UCL academics | Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire | Sheffielders

Antonia S. Byatt | A. S. Byatt | Antonia Susan Byatt | A. S. 바이어트 | A・S・バイアット

 

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