Novelist, critic and poet Dame AS Byatt has died at the age of 87, her publisher has announced.
The renowned writer, whose full name was Antonia Susan Byatt, won the Booker Prize for her 1990 novel Possession.
Her publisher Chatto & Windus confirmed that she died peacefully at home surrounded by close family.
“We mourn her loss but it’s a comfort to know that her penetrating works will dazzle, shine and refract in the minds of readers for generations to come,” said her publisher Clara Farmer.
She is survived by her husband and daughters, Antonia, Miranda and Isabel.
AS Byatt Obituary
AS Byatt was born Antonia Susan Drabble in Sheffield, England, on 24 August 1936.
She is the eldest child of John Frederick Drabble, QC, later a County Court judge, and Kathleen Bloor, a scholar of Browning.
Her sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon. Her brother Richard Drabble KC is a barrister.
The Drabble father participated in the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s.
The mother was a Shavian and the father a Quaker. As a result of the bombing of Sheffield during the Second World War the family moved to York.
AS Byatt was educated at two independent boarding schools, Sheffield High School and The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York.
She noted in an interview in 2009, “I am not a Quaker, of course, because I’m anti-Christian and the Quakers are a form of Christianity but their religion is wonderful — you simply sat in silence and listened to the nature of things.”
A “deeply unhappy” child, Byatt did not enjoy boarding school, citing her need to be alone and her difficulty in making friends.
She attended Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College (in the United States), and Somerville College, Oxford.
Having studied French, German, Latin, and English at school, she later studied Italian while attending Cambridge so that she could read Dante.
“This means that I can actually read European literature with its own rhythms even if I have to have a side-by-side text for the difficult bits”, she said in 1998.
AS Byatt lectured in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of the University of London, the Central School of Art and Design and from 1972 to 1983 at University College London.
She began writing full-time in 1983.
When is AS Byatt funeral?
There is no official information about AS Byatt’s funeral yet.
She died very recently, on 16 November 2023, and her family and publisher have not announced any details about her funeral arrangements.
Having said that, we are still following up on her death, we will update you as soon as we get important information about AS Byatt funeral service.
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