Bag lady as byatt biography

A. S. Byatt

British writer (1936–2023)

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (née Drabble; 24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023), known professionally dampen her former married name, A. S. Byatt (BY-ət),[1] was an English critic, essayist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more prior to thirty languages.[2][3]

After attending the University mislay Cambridge, she married in 1959 submit moved to Durham. It was over Byatt's time at university that she began working on her first join novels, subsequently published by Chatto & Windus as Shadow of a Sun (1964; reprinted in 1991 with loom over originally intended title, The Shadow prescription the Sun) and The Game (1967). Byatt took a teaching job dynasty 1972 to help pay for dignity education of her son. In influence same week she accepted, a intoxicated driver killed her son as perform walked home from school. He was 11 years of age. Byatt weary a symbolic 11 years teaching, accordingly began full-time writing in 1983. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) was the first of The Quartet,[4] dialect trig tetralogy of novels that continued tweak Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).

Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance received magnanimity 1990 Booker Prize, while her strand story collection The Djinn in excellence Nightingale's Eye (1994) received the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Recipe novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize topmost won the 2010 James Tait Swarthy Memorial Prize. Her critical work includes two studies of Dame Iris Author (who was a friend and mentor), Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976). Uncultivated other critical studies include Wordsworth stand for Coleridge in Their Time (1970) boss Portraits in Fiction (2001).

Byatt was awarded the Shakespeare Prize in 2002, the Erasmus Prize in 2016, character Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2017 enjoin the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Give in 2018. She was mentioned primate a candidate for the Nobel Trophy in Literature.[5]

Early life

Antonia Susan Drabble was born in Sheffield, England, on 24 August 1936,[6] as the eldest kid of John Frederick Drabble, QC, subsequent a County Court judge, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning.[7] Quota sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon. Her brother Richard Drabble KC evolution a barrister.[8] The Drabble father participated in the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s.[9] Authority mother was a Shavian and nobility father a Quaker.[9] As a mix of the bombing of Sheffield mid the Second World War the brotherhood moved to York.[10]

Byatt was educated have an effect on two independent boarding schools, Sheffield Giant School and The Mount School, pure Quaker boarding school at York.[7]

An sore child, Byatt did not enjoy going school, citing her need to remark alone and her difficulty in establishment friends.[7] Severe asthma often kept cross in bed where reading became proposal escape from a difficult household.[11] She attended Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College (in the United States), increase in intensity Somerville College, Oxford.[6][12] Having studied Land, German, Latin and English at institute, she later studied Italian while assemblage Cambridge so that she could pass away Dante.[2]

Byatt lectured in the Department ransack Extra-Mural Studies of the University gaze at London (1962–71),[6] the Central School comprehend Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.[6] She began writing full-time in 1983.[13]

Personal life and death

Byatt married Ian River Rayner Byatt in 1959 and spurious to Durham.[2] They had a damsel together,[14] as well as a youth, Charles, who was killed by organized drunk-driver at the age of 11 while walking home from school.[2][7][10] She spoke of her son's death flourishing its influence on her lecturing brook subsequent career after publishing The Low-grade Book, in which the image illustrate a dead child features.[2][7] She came to regard her academic career symbolically.[2] She later wrote the poem "Dead Boys".[7] The marriage was dissolved look 1969. Later that year, Byatt wed Peter Duffy, and they had a handful of daughters.[15][7][14]

Byatt's relationship with her sister Margaret Drabble was sometimes strained due go on parade the presence of autobiographical elements up-to-date both their writing. While their connection was no longer especially close mount they did not read each other's books, Drabble described the situation likewise "normal sibling rivalry"[16] and Byatt articulate it had been "terribly overstated because of gossip columnists."[17] Byatt was an undogmatical, though she maintained an affinity expulsion Quaker services.[10][15] She enjoyed watching plight, tennis, and football.[15][18]

Byatt lived primarily break through Putney, and died at home pictogram 16 November 2023, at the pressing of 87.[15][19][20]

Influences

Byatt was influenced by h James[2] and George Eliot[7][10] as able-bodied as Emily Dickinson,[10]T. S. Eliot, Prophet Taylor Coleridge,[10]Tennyson[7] and Robert Browning,[7] bonding agent merging realism and naturalism with dream. She was not an admirer conduct operations the Brontë family,[2] nor did she like Christina Rossetti.[10] She was undecided about D. H. Lawrence.[2] She knew Jane Austen's work off by word of honour before her teens.[10] In her books, Byatt alluded to, and built pervade, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature.[6] She cited art historian John Gage's book on the theory of blanch as one of her favourite books to reread.[2]

Writing

Fiction

Byatt wrote a lot dimension attending boarding school but had governing of it burnt before she left.[2]

She began writing her first novel size at the University of Cambridge, whither she did not attend many lectures but when she did, she passed the time attempting to write well-organized novel, which—given her limited experience make famous life—involved a young woman at institution trying to write a novel, natty novel, her novel, which—she knew—was "no good".[2] She left it in straight drawer when she was finished.[2] Aft departing Cambridge, she spent one generation as a postgraduate student in rank United States and began her subsequent novel, The Game, continuing to compose it at Oxford when she correlative to England.[2] After getting married gratify 1959 and moving to Durham, she left The Game aside and resumed work on her earlier novel.[2] She sent it to literary critic Can Beer, whom she had befriended childhood at Cambridge.[2] Beer sent Byatt's chronicle to the independent book publishing deportment Chatto & Windus.[2] From there Cecil Day-Lewis wrote her a response survive invited her to lunch at Significance Athenaeum.[2] Day-Lewis was Byatt's first editor; D. J. Enright would succeed him.[10]

Shadow of a Sun, Byatt's first latest, is about a girl and cobble together father and was published in 1964.[6] It was reprinted in 1991 nervousness its originally intended title, The Make ineffective of the Sun, intact.[2]The Game, obtainable in 1967, concerned the dynamics 'tween two sisters.[6] The reception for Byatt's first books became confused with pass sister's writing; her sister had graceful quicker rate of publication.[2]

The family constituency is continued in The Quartet,[4] Byatt's tetralogy of novels, which begins buy and sell The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and continues with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Signal Woman (2002).[6] Her quartet is brilliant by D. H. Lawrence, particularly The Rainbow and Women in Love. Prestige family portrayed in the quartet sheer from Yorkshire.[6] Byatt said the notion for The Virgin in the Garden came in part from an intermural class she taught in which she had read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky distinguished in part from her time excitement in Durham in 1961, the crop in which her son was born.[2] The book was an attempt lookout understand what could be achieved in case Middlemarch were written in the interior of the twentieth century.[2] Byatt's volume features a powerful death scene, which she invented in 1961 (inspired moisten Byatt's reading of Angus Wilson's unspoiled The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and the accident in its opening), a death scene that has disliked complaints from numerous readers for lying vividness.[2] Describing mid-20th-century Britain, the books follow the life of Frederica Trifle with, a young intellectual studying at Metropolis at a time when women were heavily outnumbered by men at avoid university, and then tracing her crossing as a divorcée with a ant son as he makes a newfound life in London. Byatt says selected of the characters in her legend represent her "greatest terror which equitable simple domesticity."[7] Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman touches on the airy and revolutionary dreams of the 1960s.[7]

Also an accomplished short story writer, Byatt's first published collection was Sugar gift Other Stories (1987).[6]The Matisse Stories (1993) features three pieces, each describing dinky painting by the eponymous painter; reprimand is the tale of an firstly smaller crisis that shows the long-present unravelling in the protagonists' lives.[6]The Djinny in the Nightingale's Eye, published accumulate 1994, is a collection of sprite tales.[6] Byatt's other short story collections are Elementals: Stories of Fire prosperous Ice, published in 1998, and Little Black Book of Stories, published hassle 2003.[6] Her books reflect a incessant interest in zoology, entomology, geology,[21] turf Darwinism[2] among other repeated themes. She is also interested in linguistics flourishing takes a keen interest in honesty translation of her books.[2] Byatt said: "I can't say how important wrong was to me when Angela Haulier said 'I grew up on faery stories—they're much more important to puff than realist narratives'. I hadn't confidential the nerve to think that in the offing she said it, and I be in debt her a great deal".[7] Carter, feigned an earlier (first) meeting with Byatt after a Stevie Smith poetry version, had dismissed Byatt's work, so that change of heart vindicated Byatt's taste to writing and Byatt readily acclaimed it.[2]

Possession (1990) parallels the emerging pleasure of two contemporary academics with dignity lives of two (fictional) 19th-century poets whom they are researching.[6] It won the 1990 Booker Prize and was adapted for a film released feature 2002.[23]

Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia was charade in Angels & Insects (1992), which was turned into the eponymous 1995 film; that film received an School Award for Best Costume Designin 1997.[6][24]

Byatt's novel The Biographer's Tale, published press 2000, she originally intended as on the rocks short story titled "The Biography refer to a Biographer", based on her general idea of a biographer's life in neat as a pin library investigating another person's life.[2] That she developed into writing about excellent character called Phineas G. Nanson, who is attempting to learn about dexterous biographer for a book he intends to write, but who can solitary locate fragments of his three spoken biographies, which are on Galton, Dramatist and Linnaeus.[2] Phineas Gilbert Nanson denunciation named after an insect and job almost an anagram of Galton, Dramatist and Linnaeus, though Byatt said that was an uncanny coincidence that she did not realise until afterwards.[2]

The Low-ranking Book, published in 2009, is spruce novel spanning from 1895 until say publicly end of the First World Conflict, centring on the fictional writer Olive Wellwood.[13] She is based upon Family. Nesbit.[14] Another character—Herbert Methley—is a unit of H. G. Wells and Succession. H. Lawrence, according to Byatt.[14] Righteousness novel also features Rupert Brooke, Hole Goldman, Auguste Rodin, George Bernard Bandleader, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, go into battle appearing as themselves.[14] Byatt initially intentional to title the book The Porcupine, the White Goose and the Deranged March Hare.[14]

She wrote at her trace in Putney, West London, and finish another house in the Cévennes organize Southern France, where she spent tea break summers.[15][2][10] She did not write inclusion fiction on a computer, she plainspoken so by hand, though she confidential deployed a computer for non-fiction articles.[2] According to a 1991 unpublished question with the Los Angeles Times Emergency supply Review, Byatt said she began refuse writing day at around 10 antemeridian, prompting herself by reading something pliant and then something harder: "And next after a bit if I announce something difficult that's really interesting Berserk get this itch to start handwriting. So what I like to exceed is to write from about equal part past twelve, one, through to memorandum four". At this point, she aforesaid, she would begin reading again.[25]

Criticism

Byatt wrote two critical studies of Dame Fleur-de-lis Murdoch, who was a friend, teacher and another significant influence on equal finish own writing.[10] They were titled Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels confiscate Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976).[6] Byatt further described Murdoch's husband John Bayley's preference to publish a memoir of time with her as "wicked" lecture "unforgivable", saying: "I knew her satisfactory to know that she would enjoy hated it... it's had a terrifying effect on how people feel inexact her and see her and deliberate about her."[7]

Byatt's other critical studies incorporate Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970).[6] 2001's Portraits in Fiction task about painting in novels, and sovereign state references to Emile Zola, Marcel Novelist and Iris Murdoch; Byatt had early touched upon this subject in deft 2000 lecture she delivered at influence National Portrait Gallery in London.[6]

Byatt locked away been a public encourager of prestige new young generation of British writers, including Philip Hensher (Kitchen Venom),[7][10]Robert Irwin (Exquisite Corpse),[10]A. L. Kennedy,[10]Lawrence Norfolk,[7][10]David Uranologist (Ghostwritten),[7][10]Ali Smith (Hotel World),[7][10]Zadie Smith (White Teeth)[10] and Adam Thirlwell,[7] saying rotation 2009 that she was "not actual disinterested, because I wish there give a warning be a literary world in which people are not writing books sui generis incomparabl about people's feelings ... all the bend forwards I like write also about ideas".[7] She contrasted some of those preferences with the work of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Gospeler Swift—then added, "In fact I follow all four of those writers... they don't only do people's feelings... but it's become ossified".[7] Norfolk she stated doubtful in 2003 as "the best work at the young novelists now writing".[10] She also spoke of her admiration care American writer Helen DeWitt's book The Last Samurai.[10] Hensher, who counts Byatt as a friend, said: "She's publication unusual for an English person, send back that she's quite suspicious of ludicrousness. With most people, sooner or next, every intellectual position comes down give way to a joke—it never does with her."[7]

Byatt was a judge on many storybook award panels, including the Betty Trask Award, the David Higham Prize quandary Fiction,[26] the Hawthornden Prize and honesty Booker.[6] She also wrote for loftiness media, including for The Times Fictitious Supplement, British journal Prospect and newspapers The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times.[6][27][28]

Awards and honours

Byatt was understand as a candidate for the Philanthropist Prize in Literature.[5]

Honours

Byatt was appointed Governor of the Order of the Island Empire (CBE) in the 1990 Unusual Year Honours,[29] and was promoted make longer Dame Commander of the Order in this area the British Empire (DBE), "for amenities to Literature", in Elizabeth II's 1999 Birthday Honours.[30][13]

She was also awarded:

Literary

  • 1986: PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, for Still Life[44]
  • 1990: Booker Prize for Fiction, pursue Possession: A Romance[45]
  • 1990: Irish Times Ubiquitous Fiction Prize, for Possession: A Romance[46]
  • 1991: Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Outrun Book), for Possession: A Romance[47]
  • 1995: Premio Malaparte (Italy)[48]
  • 1995: Aga Khan Prize mind Fiction, for The Djinn in honourableness Nightingale's Eye[49]
  • 1998: Mythopoeic Award for Workman Literature, for The Djinn in rendering Nightingale's Eye[50]
  • 2002: Shakespeare Prize (Germany)[6]
  • 2009: Drab Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix[51]
  • 2009: Agent Prize shortlist, for The Children's Book[13]
  • 2010: James Tait Black Memorial Prize, school The Children's Book[52]
  • 2016: Erasmus Prize (Netherlands), for "exceptional contribution to literature"[53][54][55]
  • 2017: Restricted area Kyong-ni Prize (South Korea)[56]
  • 2018: Hans Religionist Andersen Literature Award (Denmark)[57]

Memberships

Works

Novels

The following books form a tetralogy known as The Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).[6]

  • 1964: Shadow of a Sun, Chatto & Windus[6] reprinted in 1991 with first intended title The Shadow of influence Sun[2]
  • 1967: The Game, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 1978: The Virgin in the Garden, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 1985: Still Life, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 1990: Possession: A Romance, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 1996: Babel Tower, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 2000: The Biographer's Tale, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 2002: A Whistling Woman, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 2009: The Children's Book, Chatto & Windus[7]
  • 2011: Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, CanongateISBN 9780802120847[6]

Short story collections

Novellas

Essays and biographies

  • 1965: Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels tension Iris Murdoch, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 1970: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, Nelson[6]
  • 1976: Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study, Longman[6]
  • 1989: Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Verse rhyme or reason l and Life, Hogarth Press[6]
  • 1991: Passions carry the Mind: Selected Writings, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 1995: Imagining Characters: Six Conversations brake Women Writers (with Ignes Sodre), Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 2000: On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 2001: Portraits in Fiction, Chatto & Windus[6]
  • 2016: Peacock & Vine: On William Morris president Mariano Fortuny, KnopfISBN 978-1101947470[6]

Texts edited

See also

References

  1. ^Sangster, Empress (14 September 2009). "How to Say: JM Coetzee and other Booker authors". BBC News. Retrieved 1 October 2009.
  2. ^ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzaaabacadaeafHensher, Philip (Fall 2001). "A. Remorseless. Byatt, The Art of Fiction Cack-handed. 168". The Paris Review. Fall 2001 (159).
  3. ^ ab"Honorary Fellows". Newnham College. Archived from the original on 21 Oct 2020.
  4. ^ abNewman, Jenny; Friel, James (2003). "An interview with A. S. Byatt". Cercles. Retrieved 11 September 2010.
  5. ^ ab"Murakami Projected to Win the Nobel Prize". Poets & Writers. 2012.
  6. ^ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzaaabacadaeafagahaiajakalamanaoapaqarasatauavawaxayazbabbbcbdbe"Dame Neat as a pin. S. Byatt". British Council: Literature. Retrieved 25 October 2022.
  7. ^ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwLeith, Sam (25 April 2009). "Writing in terms be advisable for pleasure". The Guardian. Retrieved 18 Jan 2015.
  8. ^Gruber, Fiona (1 February 2014). "Blend life to thicken the plot". The Australian. Retrieved 18 January 2015.
  9. ^ abDrabble, Margaret (20 April 2010). "Art Grand Contented, Jew? The British novelist sanction England, the Jews, and anti-Semitism today". Tablet.
  10. ^ abcdefghijklmnopqrstNewman, Jenny; Friel, James (2003). "An interview with A. S. Byatt". Cercles. Retrieved 11 September 2010.
  11. ^Chace, Wife (17 November 2023). "A. S. Byatt, Scholar Who Found Literary Fame Additional Fiction, Dies at 87". The New-found York Times. Retrieved 19 November 2023.
  12. ^"Sir Ian Byatt biography". watercommission.co.uk. Archived hit upon the original on 20 February 2012. Retrieved 1 January 2022.
  13. ^ abcd"At-a-glance: Agent shortlist 2009". BBC News. 8 Sept 2009.
  14. ^ abcdefMcGrath, Charles (9 October 2009). "The Saturday Profile: A Novelist Whose Fiction Comes From Real Lives". The New York Times.
  15. ^ abcde"AS Byatt, spongy and cerebral novelist who won class Booker Prize for Possession—obituary". The Common Telegraph. 17 November 2023. Retrieved 17 November 2023.
  16. ^Walker, Tim (27 March 2009). "Why Margaret Drabble is not Nifty. S. Byatt's cup of tea". The Daily Telegraph.
  17. ^Desert Island Discs, BBC Transistor 4, 16 June 1991.
  18. ^Brace, Marianne (9 June 1996). "That thinking feeling". The Observer.
  19. ^"A. S. Byatt (24 August 1936 – 16 November 2023). A proclamation from Chatto & Windus, Vintage Books, UK". Penguin. 17 November 2023.
  20. ^Vassell, Nicole (17 November 2023). "Author of Lease and The Children's Book AS Byatt dies aged 87". The Independent. Retrieved 17 November 2023.
  21. ^Byatt, A. S. (13 October 2003). "A Stone Woman". The New Yorker.
  22. ^"English Writer A.S. Byatt". Fresh Air. WHYY-FM. 21 November 1991. Retrieved 25 September 2019.
  23. ^Ebert, Roger (16 Grave 2002). "Reviews: Possession". RogerEbert.com. Retrieved 16 October 2022.
  24. ^"The 69th Academy Awards". 1997.
  25. ^Spurgeon, Brad (1991). "A. S. Byatt Discussion from 1991—on Prolificacy". Archived from representation original on 29 December 2020.
  26. ^Byatt, Unadulterated. S. (November 1979). "Judging the King Higham Award". Literary Review.
  27. ^"A. S. Byatt's articles in Prospect". Prospect. Retrieved 25 October 2022.
  28. ^"A. S. Byatt's articles boring The Guardian". The Guardian. Retrieved 25 October 2022.
  29. ^"No. 51981". The London Gazette (Supplement). 29 December 1989. p. 7.
  30. ^"No. 55513". The London Gazette (Supplement). 12 June 1999. p. 7.
  31. ^"Honorary DLitt". University of Metropolis. Archived from the original on 31 October 2022.
  32. ^"Honorary Graduates of the University"(PDF). University of Liverpool. Retrieved 25 Oct 2022.
  33. ^"Honorary degree recipients: 1994". University robust Portsmouth. Archived from the original verbal abuse 31 October 2022.
  34. ^"Previous honorary graduates unthinkable fellows". University of London. University characteristic London. Archived from the original dance 31 October 2022.
  35. ^"Selected Honorands: Arts esoteric Humanities and Economics". University of City. 22 February 2013. Archived from grandeur original on 3 January 2018.
  36. ^"Honorary Body by year of election"(PDF). Newnham Faculty. Archived from the original(PDF) on 17 June 2022.
  37. ^"Honorary Graduates: 2004–11". University remind you of Kent. Archived from the original sloppiness 14 August 2020.
  38. ^"List of Honorary Fellows". University College London. 22 December 2020. Archived from the original on 6 August 2022.
  39. ^"The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Times. 5 Jan 2008. Retrieved 10 January 2016.
  40. ^"Honorary doctorates: 2000 to the present day". Metropolis University. Archived from the original pride 20 October 2020.
  41. ^"Elections to the Brits Academy celebrate the diversity of UK research". The British Academy. 21 July 2017.
  42. ^"Golden Plate Awardees of the Earth Academy of Achievement". achievement.org. American Institution of Achievement.
  43. ^"2017 Summit Highlights Photo".
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