Reading was Antonia Drabble’s passport away from a miserable childhood, and as writer A. S. Byatt it was what made her a literary star.
The writer, born August 24, 1936, died on November 16.
Possession, arguably her finest work, was testament to her fondness for literature.
It follows two young academics investigating the lives of a pair of imaginary Victorian poets.
The novel, a double romance which skilfully layers a modern story with mock-Victorian letters and poems, was a huge bestseller and won the prestigious Booker Prize.
Accepting the prize, Byatt said Possession was about the joy of reading.
"My book was written on a kind of high about the pleasures of reading," Byatt said.
Possession later was adapted into a 2002 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart, and was one of several Byatt books to get the film treatment.
Morpho Eugenia, a gothic Victorian novella included in the 1992 book Angels and Insects, became a 1995 movie of the same name, starring Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas.
Her short story The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, which won the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, inspired the 2022 fantasy film Three Thousand Years of Longing, which starred Idris Elba as a genie who spins tales for an academic played by Tilda Swinton.
Born Antonia Susan Drabble in Sheffield, northern England, — her sister is novelist Margaret Drabble — Byatt grew up in a Quaker family.
A self-described "deeply unhappy" child, Byatt endured a torrid time at boarding school and at home, retreating to books and silent reading as her defence.
After attending Cambridge University she married economist Ian Byatt in 1959 and they had a daughter and a son before divorcing.
In 1972, her 11-year-old son, Charles, was struck and killed by a car while walking home from school.
Charles died shortly after Byatt had taken a teaching post at University College London to pay for his private school fees.
After his death, she told The Guardian in 2009, she stayed in the job "as long as he had lived, which was 11 years." In 1983, she quit to become a full-time writer. Byatt lived in London with her second husband, Peter Duffy, with whom she had two daughters.
Queen Elizabeth II made Byatt a dame in 1999 for services to literature, and in 2003 she was made a chevalier (knight) of France’s Order of Arts and Letters.
She was occasionally mentioned when speculation about the Nobel Prize for Literature came about.
In 2014, a species of iridescent beetle was named for her — Euhylaeogena byattae Hespenheide — in honour of her depiction of naturalists in Morpho Eugenia.
Byatt’s first novel, Shadow of a Sun, was published in 1964, and told the story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father.
More works followed, some of them frantically written during university holidays.
Byatt’s other books include four novels set in 1950s and 1960s Britain that together are known as the Frederica Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden, published in 1978, followed by Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman.
She also wrote the 2009 Booker Prize finalist The Children’s Book, a sweeping story of Edwardian England centered on a writer of fairy tales.
Her most recent book was Medusa’s Ankles, a volume of short stories published in 2021.
Byatt was also a respected poet and incisive critic.
She courted controversy in 2003 when she questioned adults reading the hugely successful Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling.
"Ms Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous.
"It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated ... mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip," she wrote.
Byatt’s literary agent, Zoe Waldie, said the author "held readers spellbound" with writing that was "multi-layered, endlessly varied and deeply intellectual, threaded through with myths and metaphysics".
Clara Farmer, Byatt’s publisher at Chatto & Windus — part of Penguin Random House — said the author’s books were "the most wonderful jewel-boxes of stories and ideas".
"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." — Agencies
